Andrew Donskov
[Page 68, Figure]
I-10: Title page of Timofej Bondarev's (1906)
Torzhestvo
zemledel'tsa ili Trudoljubie i Tunejadstvo
[The Triumph of the
Landtiller, or Industry
and Idleness]. The words printed beneth the actual title read:
"COMPOSITION / of the peasant T. BONDAREV / with a foreward by /
Lev Nik. TOLSTOY / Posrednik Edition / No. 597 / 1906
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Bondarev
and Tolstoy
Excerpts
from: Leo
Tolstoy and the Canadian Doukhobors: an historical relationship, by Andrew Donskov, 2005.
Donskov
is a Distinquished Professor and Director of the
Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa, Canada
Pages 47-48:
...Especially noteworthy are his [Tolstoy's] exchanges of letters with Sabbatarian Timofej Bondarev (Donskov
1996c), Molokan writer Fedor Zheltov
(Donskov 2001) and radical dissident
Mikhail
Novikov (Donskov 1996a). The text of
Tolstoy's treatise Tak chto zhe nam
delat'? [What then
must be done?] (1886) suggests two powerful role models for his (and,
by
extension, others') moral regeneration. He wrote (PSS 25: 386):
Over my whole lifetime two
Russian thinking people had a profound
moral influence on me; they enriched my thought and clarified my
worldview. These people were not Russian poets, scholars or preachers —
they were two remarkable men who are still alive today, having lived
their whole lives by the sweat of their brow — the peasants Sjutaev
and Bondarev.
This paragraph reveals several important features in Tolstoy's
thought. It begins with a reference to his lifelong preoccupation with
moral questions. It suggests the exclusion of any contribution from his
own class or from the clergy to his Weltanschauung,
[world view] which drew upon the
solid moral fibre of ordinary Russian peasants, whose life derived its
meaning from working 'by the sweat of their brow'. They had not only
enriched, but actually clarified (ujasnili) his thought for him. This
was an extremely important point for him in his socalled
'postconversion period' (following the completion of Anna Karenina in
the late 1870s) and is of utmost importance in any discussion of
Tolstoy and the peasantry.
It is also significant that the two peasants mentioned were both
sectarians: Vasilij K. Sjutaev (1820-1892) was well known to Tolstoy
and contemporary writers, while Timofej M. Bondarev (1820-1898), who
belonged to the Sabbatarians;
(a splinter group of the Molokans,
which
had earlier broken away from the Doukhobors) carried on
an extensive
correspondence with Tolstoy from 1885 until his death in 1898.(12)
___________________
- Regarding Bondarev's writings on religious
utopias,
see my essay in Donskov 1996b: 1-15. For
more on
Bondarev and Sjutaev, see: Bondarev
(1890, 1906), Donskov (1996b, 1997), Gastev
(1912), Kosovanov (1958),
Shesterikov (1928) and Unknown author (1913).
Pages 52-54:
Sectarian Timofej Bondarev
Throughout his correspondence with Bondarev
(see Donskov 1996b),
Tolstoy
applied a religious
perspective to the question of landless peasants. The letters are
marked with frequent repetitions of his tenet that physical landtilling
labour is a necessary precondition for a moral, happy and joyful life
on earth. Bondarev, for his
part, kept insisting that field labour is a
fundamental religious law of
life. Bondarev comes across as a colourful
figure, a Russian peasant who, though unshakeable in his convictions,
is not at one with his milieu because of the penetrating insight of his
sharp analytical mind and the logic of his conclusions.
In his correspondence with Bondarev,
Tolstoy makes particular reference
to Bondarev's work Torzhestvo
zemledel'tsa ili Trudoljubie i Tunejadstvo [The Triumph of the
Landtiller, or Industry
and Idleness] [cover in left sidebar] a work which Tolstoy helped get
published.
Written in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it is largely based on the
Biblical decree in Genesis (3:19): "In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast
thou taken..." Bondarev argues
that people sin because they do not obey
this rule, which he takes literally. Tolstoy shared Bondarev's
criticism of militarism and the noble classes, as well as his
condemnation not only of the corruption rampant in the civil service
but also the narrowness and intolerance of the church hierarchy.
Over and over again in his subsequent works Tolstoy returns to Bondarev's ideas.(20)
In working out his Cycle of readings
in 1904, he
included in his 'Monthly readings' section an excerpt from Bondarev's
book, with an accompanying article he had penned in 1895. He also
mentions Bondarev in a diary
entry in 1906 (PSS 55: 212):
It has become quite clear to me
of late that the life of the landtiller
is not just one of the various types of life, but is life itself, just
as the Bible is life itself, the only life of mankind, and it is only
through such a life that the higher human qualities can be manifested.
The chief mistake in the organisation of human societies — a mistake
that removes the opportunity for any kind of intelligent lifestructure
— is that people wish to set up their society either without any
landtilling activity or whereby such activity is only one — and the
most demeaning — way of life. How right is Bondarev!
All this testifies to the existence of a complementary or even
symbiotic relationship between society and the tilling of the land, a
hypothesis confirmed in Tolstoy's letter to Bondarev of 26 March 1886:
I read your long manuscript and
addendum. Both are very good and
true... I am in agreement with everything said in the manuscript and
shall only mention a couple of points where I see things differently.
The first law is "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread", but
in order for this law to avoid being violated, one must also obey a
second law: "Resist not evil".(21)
And later on Tolstoy acknowledges frankly: "I have found in you a
strong helper in this cause. I hope you have found a helper in me. Our
cause is one and the same." (Donskov 1996b: 34).
It is worth noting that Bondarev's
work proved very timely for Tolstoy,
appearing at the very moment when the latter was particularly concerned
over questions of the peasantry (especially the suffering and
maltreatment experienced by the Doukhobors), hard labour, the
simplicity of peasant life etc. Such questions grew out of the deep
dissatisfaction thi writer felt toward his social class, and even more
toward himself. Bon darev's ideas were a source of enrichment to
Tolstoy's own views on life and gave a religious perspective to the
whole issue of peasant labour tha was a lifetime concern of Tolstoy's.
_______________
- Abbreviated variants of Bondarev's work are known to us from
their
publication in the weekly "Russkoe Delo" (1888, no. 1213), with an
Afterword by Tolstoy. In 1890, thanks to Tolstoy's cooperation, a
French translation was published: "Le'on Tolstoi et Timothe' Bondareff.
Le travail". Traduit du russe par V. Tseytline et A. Pages (Paris,
1890). Interestingly, the English version published the same year was
based not on the Russian but on the French translation by Tseytline and
Pages — see: "The suppressed book of the peasant Bondareff. Labour:
the divine command. Made known, augmented and edited by Count Lyof
Tolstoy". Trans. Mary Cruger (Toronto, 1890). Bondarev repeatedly
complained both to Tolstoy and to G. I. Uspenskij about the poor
translation of his work (a reverse translation into Russian was done by
a local translator at his request), as well as about the many
abridgements. The manuscript ran approximately 200 sheets. "The triumph
of the landtiller, or Industry and Idleness" was also published in
condensed form by Posrednik in 1906 (Bondarev
1906). See also Illustration
10 below.
- Donskov
1996b: 33-34. Tolstoy concluded the letter by reaffirming
the importance of physical labour: "I shall soon be 60 years old and
have had millions of torments, but over the past few years I have been
both reaping and ploughing, and hope to do so again this year. And joy
and health and inner peace I find most of all in this work."
Bibliography
Donskov Andrew 1996b. L.N. Tolstoj i
T.M. Bondarev: perepiska. Munich:
Verlag Otto Sagner, 1996. [ISBN: 3-87690-635-0 / Dewey: 891.7]
Donskov Andrew 1997. "Pis'ma Bondareva k L.N. Tolstomu". Russkaja
literartura no. 1 (1997): 163-81.
Gastev, Petr 1912. "Vospominanija o Vasilii Kirilloviche Sjuteve". Vegetarianskoe obozrenie
no.1 (1912): 24-28 & no.2 (1912):66-72.
Kosovanov, Natalia 1983. "The Doukhobors". In Tamara F. Jeletsky (ed.) Russian Canadians: their past
and present. Ottawa: Borealis, 1983:
11-47.
Shesterikov, S. 1928. "Zametka Leskova o Sjutaeve". In: N.N. Gusev
(ed.), Lev Tolstoj. Jubilejnyj
sbornik. Moskva i Leningrad: Gozidat
[Khudozhdestvennoj literatury], 1928:329-31.
Unknown author 1913. "Sjutaev and Bondarev". Tolstovskij ezhegodnik.
S.-Petersburg & Moskva:Izd. Tolstovskogo muzeja v Sankt-Peterburge
i Tolstovskogo obshchestva v Moskve, 1913:1-44.
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