What Then Must We Do? 1886

Many readers were indignant when this essay exposed them to the terrible poverty Tolstoy saw in Moscow after he volunteered to be part of the 1882 census. “It is not Marxist, nor revolutionary in the political sense at all. And one of the most impressive things about it is its description of how Tolstoy grew out of wishing to patronise the poor, and discovered that it was impossible to romanticise their position. ‘Among them, as among us, there were some more or less good and more or less bad, more or less happy and more or less miserable; and the unhappy were just as exist among ourselves; people whose unhappiness depends not on external conditions but on themselves – a kind of unhappiness bank notes cannot cure’ (p363, Tolstoy, Wilson). Nevertheless Tolstoy also argues in the text that property ownership is the root of all evil and that Church and State protect the wealthy.