Leo Tolstoy's Wisdom
Since I have been living in the Russian-speaking countries I have naturally taken an interest in the history and culture of Russia. One of the authors who I have read a great deal of is Tolstoy. He was a great man. Although born of aristocratic parents he had difficulty dealing with his peasants as others did. He wanted to educate them, much to their own bewilderment. He wanted to treat them well, as he would treat his own children, the way a proper ksatriya would, and he even went and lived among them. He had read the Bhagavad-gita and to some degree he had understood the concept of creating a proper culture based on principles the principles of varna, and had some desire to try to establish the same. Late in life he became a renunciate and left his home, traveling about, as a sort of sannyasi. He has written many wonderful things, one of which is this article, that all young people, and all women in particular would benefit from reading, and hopefully by doing so realize their power, and act within their true power to give us a better world, and brighter future. I offer it here on the Gitagrad blog because of the contribution these ideas make to the creation of a wholesome society.
An Appeal to Women by Lev Tolstoy
As stated in the Bible, a law was
given to the man and the woman-to the man, the law of labor; to the woman, the
law of bearing children. Although we, with our science, avons change tout ca,
[have changed all this], the law for the man, as for woman, remains as
unalterable as the liver in its place, and departure from it is equally
punished with inevitable death. The only difference lies in this, that
departure from the law, in the case of the man, is punished so immediately in
the future, that it may be designated as present punishment; but departure from
the law, in the case of the woman, receives its chastisement in a more distant
future.
The general departure of all men
from the law exterminates people immediately; the departure from it of all
women annihilates it in the succeeding generation. But the evasion by some men
and some women does not exterminate the human race, and only deprives those who
evade it of the rational nature of man. The departure of men from this law
began long ago, among those classes who were in a position to subject others,
and, constantly spreading, it has continued down to our own times; and in our
own day it has reached folly, the ideal consisting in evasion of the law,–the ideal
expressed by Prince Blokhin, and shared in by Renan and by the whole cultivated
world: “Machines will work, and people will be bundles of nerves devoted to
enjoyment.”
There was hardly any departure from
the law in the part of women, it was expressed only in prostitution, and in the
refusal to bear children–in private cases. The women belonging to the wealthy
classes fulfilled their law, while the men did not comply with theirs; and
therefore the women became stronger, and continued to rule, and must rule, over
men who have evaded the law, and who have, therefore, lost their senses. It is
generally stated that woman (the woman of Paris in particular is childless) has
become so bewitching, through making use of all the means of civilization, that
she has gained the upper hand over man by this fascination of hers.
This [statement] is not only
unjust, but precisely the reverse of the truth. It is not the childless woman
who has conquered man, but the mother, that woman who has fulfilled her law,
while the man has not fulfilled his. That woman who deliberately remains
childless, and who entrances man with her shoulders and her locks, is not the
woman who rules over men, but the one who has been corrupted by man, who has
descended to his level—to the level of the vicious man,–who has evaded the law
equally with himself, and who has lost, in company with him, every rational
idea of life.
From this error springs that
remarkable piece of stupidity which is called the rights of women. The formula
of these rights of women is as follows: “Here! you man,” says the woman, “you
have departed from your law of real labor, and you want us to bear the burden
of our real labor. No, if this is to be so, we understand, as well as you do,
how to perform those semblances of labor which you exercise in banks, ministries,
universities, and academies; we desire, like yourselves, under the pretext of
the division of labor, to make use of the labor of others, and to live for the
gratification of our caprices alone.” They say this, and prove by their action
that they understand no worse, if not better, than men, how to exercise this
semblance of labor.
This so-called woman question has
come up, and could only come up, among men who have departed from the law of
actual labor. All that is required is, to return to that, and this question
cannot exist. Woman, having her own inevitable task, will never demand the
right to share the toil of men in the mines and in the fields. She could only
demand to share in the fictitious labors of the men of the wealthy classes.
The woman of our circle has been,
and still is, stronger than the man, not by virtue of her fascinations, not
through her cleverness in performing the same pharisaical semblance of work as
man, but because she has not stepped out from under the law that she should
undergo that real labor, with danger to her life, with exertion to the last degree,
from which the man of the wealthy classes has excused herself.
But, within my memory, a departure
from this law on the part of woman, that is to say, her fall, has begun; and,
within my memory, it has become more and more the case. Woman, having lost the
law, has acquired the belief that her strength lies in the witchery of her
charms, or in her skill in pharisaical pretences at intellectual work. And both
things are bad for the children. And, within my memory, women of the wealthy
classes have come to refuse to bear children. And so mothers who hold the power
in their hands let it escape them, in order to make way for the dissolute women,
and to put themselves on a level with them. The evil is already wide-spread,
and is extending farther and farther every day; and soon it will lay hold on
all the women of the wealthy classes, and then they will compare themselves
with men: and in company with them, they will lose the rational meaning of
life.
But there is still time.
If women would but comprehend their
destiny, their power, and use it for the salvation of their husbands, brothers,
and children—for the salvation of all men!
Listen, women of the wealthy
classes who are mothers: the salvation of the men of our world from the evils
from which they are suffering, lies in your hands.
Not those women who are occupied
with their dainty figures, with their bustles, their hair-dressing, and their
attraction for men, and who bear children against their will, with despair, and
hand them over to nurses; nor those who attend various courses of lectures, and
discourse of psychometric centres and differentiation, and who also endeavor to
escape bearing children, in order that it may not interfere with their folly
which they call culture: but those women and mothers, who, possessing the power
to refuse to bear children, consciously and in a straightforward way submit to
this eternal, unchangeable law, knowing that the burden and the difficulty of
such submission is their appointed lot in life—these are the women and mothers
of our wealthy classes, in whose hands, more than in those of anyone else, lies
the salvation of the men of our sphere in society from the miseries that
oppress them.
Ye women and mothers who
deliberately submit yourselves to the law of God, you alone in our wretched,
deformed circle, which has lost the semblance of humanity, you alone know the
whole of the real meaning of life, according to the law of God; and you alone,
by your example, can demonstrate to people that happiness in life, in
submission to the will of God, of which they are depriving themselves.
You alone know those raptures and
those joys which invade the whole being, that bliss which is appointed for the
man who does not depart from the law of God. You know the happiness of love for
your husbands—a happiness which does not come to an end, which does not break
off short, like all other forms of happiness, and which constitutes the
beginning of a new happiness—of love for your child.
You alone, when you are simple and
obedient to the will of God, know not that farcical pretence of labor which the
men of our circle call work, and know that the labor imposed by God on men, and
know its true rewards, the bliss which it confers. You know this, when, after
the raptures of love, you await with emotion, fear, and terror that torturing state
of pregnancy which renders you ailing for nine months, which brings you to the
verge of death, and to intolerable suffering and pain. You know the conditions
of true labor, when, with joy, you await the approach and the increase of the
most terrible torture, after which to you alone comes the bliss which you well
know.
You know this, when, immediately after
this torture, without respite, without a break, you undertake another series of
toils and sufferings—nursing—in which process you at one and the same time
deny yourselves, and subdue to your feelings the very strongest human need,
that of sleep, which, as the proverb says, is dearer than father or mother; and
for months and years you never get a single sound, unbroken might’s rest, and
sometimes, nay, often, you do not sleep at all for a period of several nights
in succession, but with failing arms you walk alone, punishing the sick child
who is breaking your heart. And when you do all this, applauded by no one, and
expecting no praises for it from any one, nor any reward—when you do this, not
as an heroic deed, but like the laborer in the Gospel when he came from the
field, considering that you have done only that which was your duty, then you
know what the false, pretentious labor of men performed for glory really is,
and that true labor is fulfilling the will of God, whose command you feel in your
heart.
You know that if you are a true
mother it makes no difference that no one has seen your toil, that no one has
praised you for it, but that it has only been looked upon as what must needs be
so, and that even those for whom you have labored not only do not thank you,
but often torture and reproach you. And with the next child you do the same:
again you suffer, again you undergo the fearful, invisible labor; and again you
expect no reward from any one, and yet you feel the sane satisfaction.
If you are like this, you will not
say after two children, or after twenty, that you have done enough, just as the
laboring man fifty years of age will not say that he has worked enough, while
he still continues to eat and to sleep, and while his muscles still demand
work; if you are like this, you will not cast the task of nursing and
care-taking upon some other mother, just as a laboring man will not give
another man the work which he has begun, and almost completed, to finish:
because into this work you will throw your life. And therefore the more there
is of this work, the fuller and the happier is your life.
And when you are like this, for the
good fortune of men, you will apply that law of fulfilling God’s will, by which
you guide your life, to the lives of your husband, of your children, and of
those most nearly connected with you.
If you are like this, and know from
your own experience, that only self-sacrificing, unseen, unrewarded labor,
accompanied with danger to life and to the extreme bounds of endurance, for the
lives of others, is the appointed lot of man, which affords him satisfaction,
then you will announce these demands to others; you will urge your husband to
the same toil; and you will measure and value the dignity of men acceding to
this toil; and for this toil you will also prepare your children.
Only that mother who looks upon
children as a disagreeable accident, and upon love, the comforts of life,
costume, and society, as the object of life, will rear her children in such a
manner that they shall have as much enjoyment as possible out of life, and that
they shall make the greatest possible use of it; only she will feed them
luxuriously, deck them out, amuse them artificially; only she will teach them,
not that which will fit them for self-sacrificing masculine or feminine labor
with danger of their lives, and to the last limits of endurance, but that which
will deliver them from this labor.
Only such a woman, who has lost the
meaning of her life, will sympathize with that delusive and false male labor,
by means of which her husband, having rid himself of the obligations of a man,
is enabled to enjoy, in her company, the work of others. Only such a woman will
choose a similar man for the husband of her daughter, and will estimate men,
not by what they are personally, but by that which is connected with
them—position, money, or their ability to take advantage of the labor of
others.
But the true mother, who actually
knows the will of God, will fit her children to fulfil it also. For such a
mother, to see her child overfed, enervated, decked out, will mean suffering;
for all this, as she well knows, will render difficult for him the fulfilment
of the law of God in which she has instructed him. Such a mother will teach,
not that which will enable her son and her daughter to rid themselves of labor,
but that which will help them to endure the toils of life.
She will have no
need to inquire what she shall teach her children, for what she shall prepare
them. Such a woman will not only not encourage her husband to false and
delusive labor, which has but one object, that of using the labors of others;
but she will bear herself with disgust and horror towards such an employment,
which serves as a double temptation to her children. Such a woman will not
choose a husband for her daughter on account of the whiteness of his hands and
the refinement of manner; but, well aware that labor and deceit will exist
always and everywhere, she will, beginning with her husband, respect and value
in men, and will require from them, real labor, with expenditure and risk of
life, and she will despise that deceptive labor which has for its object the
ridding one’s self of all true toil.
Such a mother, who brings forth
children and nurses them, and will herself, rather than any other, feed her
offspring and prepare their food, and sew, and wash, and teach her children,
and sleep and talk with them, because in this she grounds the business of her
life,–only such a mother will not seek for her children external guaranties in
the form of her husband’s money, and the children’s diplomas; but she will rear
them to that same capacity for the self-sacrificing fulfillment of the will of
God which she is conscious of herself possessing—a capacity for enduring toil
with expenditure and risk of life—because she knows that in this lies the sole
guaranty, and the only well-being in life. Such a mother will not ask other
people what she ought to do; she will know everything, and will fear nothing.
If there can exist any doubt for
the man and for the childless woman, as to the path in which the fulfillment of
the will of God lies, this path is firmly and clearly defined for the woman who
is a mother; and if she has complied with it in submissiveness and in
simplicity of spirit, she, standing on that loftiest height of bliss which the
human being is permitted to attain, will become a guiding-star for all men who
are seeking good. Only the mother can calmly say before her death, to Him who
sent her into this world, and to Him whom she has served by bearing and rearing
children more dear than herself—only she can say calmly, having served Him
who has imposed this service upon her: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace.” And this is the highest perfection, towards which, as towards the
highest bliss, men are striving.
Such are the women, who, having
fulfilled their destiny, reign over powerful men; such are the women who
prepare the new generations of people, and fix public opinion: and, therefore,
in the hands of these women lies the highest power of saving men from the
prevailing and threatening evils of our times. Yes, ye women and mothers, in
your hands, more than in those of all others, lies the salvation of the world!
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