Bethinking Ourselves

Leo Tolstoy’s pacifism is well known and has been highly influential. What is less known though is that his pacifism emerged not only after his post-1880 “conversion” to an idiosyncratic and highly personal form of Christianity, but was concomitant with his opposition to the Russo-Japanese War and with the critique of Eurocentrism and Islamophobia in his late novella Hadji Murad. That Tolstoy, notwithstanding the didacticism of his later work, remains the extraordinary writer who produced War and Peace and Anna Karenina means that his later work must be read discursively, and stands at the intersection between modernist experimentation and radical nonconformist Christianity. This essay therefore reads Tolstoy’s treatise Bethink Yourselves, his statement of opposition to the Russo-Japanese War, as a literary document, noting that it critiques not just Tolstoy’s “own” Russian side of the war but the Japanese militarism which, after all, initiated the conflict. Pacifism emerges not just as an empirical antiwar stance in Tolstoy’s work but as a deeply philosophical conviction which is also manifest in the textual grain of his work. Tolstoy should not be exalted as a superhuman prophet. Indeed, his work exhibits some insoluble contradictions that stem from his highly personal approach to his life, writing, and philosophy. But Tolstoy’s critique of violence should be newly appreciated not just as a globally applicable and relevant statement of pacifist ideals but as a rhetorical enactment of how pacifism itself can be at once a theoretical set of abstract principles and a tactical practice committed to an anti-racist and anti-Eurocentric vantage point.