Monk

The death of Leo Tolstoy on November 20, 1910 in a small railway station in southern Russia, was being turned into mythology even as it was happening. Pathé, the pioneer of newsreels, made one of its first moving-pictures about the event. Lenin had said two years earlier that Tolstoy was "a mirror of the revolution." Both communist revolutionaries and the Russian government were watching to see what the effect of the death of the great anarchist would be on the Russian people, who felt that they had lost not just a great artist but the most eloquent voice that had thundered on their behalf against monstrous injustices.

-- A.N. Wilson for Slate.com

I'm not really a Tolstoy man, at least not as a reader. I have read half of "War and Peace" and set it back down and have never tried another work. Dostoevsky seems to have my number much better. Though, I had heard about how Tolstoy gave up the privileged life in pursuit of living an egalitarian ideal, and this especially attracted me when I was a Walden Two utopian in my absurdly idealistic twenties. For those who didn't know this about me, you can read B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two" to see what I thought the ideal society should look like. I even peddled this vision a little when I first got into the blogosphere at Blurty, though it didn't take me long to see that others are not inclined to be as fascinated by the idea as I was, not even the young and very liberal people I was meeting in this blogging world, which surprised and hurt me a little. In truth, I still fancy that egalitarian vision, but now have a deep understanding of why it is another sort of fairytale. In any case, it wasn't until recently that I understood how much Christianity played in Tolstoy's grand vision:

After writing that novel ["Anna Karenina"], however, Tolstoy had a midlife crisis and became a fervent Orthodox Christian. Changing again, he decided that the Church was teaching mumbo-jumbo. What mattered was what Jesus himself had taught. And what Jesus taught, in Tolstoy's version—he actually rewrote the gospels —was pacifism, anarchism, no government, no army, no upper classes, no quest for wealth. To this was added Tolstoy's own increasingly obsessive vegetarianism.

It is interesting, by the way, to see how heavily Christianity plays in Dostoevsky's work as well, though I take it Dosty was more realistic about what man can achieve outside of Heaven. One of the things that supported my own recently resurgent interest in Christianity was the notion that my old Utopian inclinations could yet be realized, just not until God came down to establish his eternal and perfect kingdom. Old habits die hard, and some perhaps never completely die out, and maybe they even help to keep us going, like a dream of love.

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In his novel "I Married a Communist," Philip Roth writes: "He tells you capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system. What is life if not a dog-eat-dog system? This is a system that is in tune with life. And because it is, it works.

"Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it's based on the truth about people's selfishness, and theirs doesn't because it's based on a fairy tale about people's brotherhood. It's such a crazy fairy tale they've got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it."

-- Roger Cohen for The New York Times

Mr. Cohen is actually writing in response to one of those sleazy business practices: backdating stock options to when the stock market was at its lowest during the 9/11 aftermath, a sort of profiteering off the terrorist attacks on America. But you can see the thought evolves from there.

Life in the real world, baby, is no perfect world, and we have to make do with what we got! The real choices.

Though, like religion, it is perhaps irresistible, especially for life's losers, to think that life can be better than this. Some day. Over the rainbow. When there is more on tap than bitter vinegar. Whatever gets you through the day, baby!

( Cohen column )

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