ABSTRACT
I IT is often suggested that Tolstoy's influence on the revolution of 1917 was similar to that of Rousseau's upon the revolution of 1789. This is true only in so far as Tolstoy became an indirect revolutionary force, even though his ideas and ideals had nothing to do either with the character or with the consequences of the Russian cataclysm. His doctrine of non-res~stance was anti-revolutionary in its very essence and, as Lenin himself remarked in 1911, played into the hands of the oppressors. Regarding any exercise of power or authority as a dividing agent and therefore immoral, he moreover condemned not only revolutions, but all man-made laws -even when these were concerned with the planning or the working for a better future. He actually ridiculed the idea that we could know or plan anything about the social forms of the future and saw in it a superstition, alongside with such other superstitions as patriotism, science and anti-religious thought. 'When you have freed yourselves from these superstitions', he insists in his article On Socialism, 'you should first of all endeavour to study all that which has been attained by the great thinkers of mankind concerning the true basis of life. And when you have thus acquired a sound religious lifeconception, you should next endeavour to fulfil its demand not with the object of achieving-by yourselves or by any one else-certain aims, but in order to fulfil the purpose of human life unmistakably leading to an unknown, but blissful destiny.'
