I Cannot Be Silent

by Leo Tolstoy

(...)" This, daily repeated in every newspaper and continued, not for weeks, not months, not for one year, but for years! And this in Russia, that same Russia where the people regard every criminal as a man to be pitied, and where till quite recently capital punishment was not recognised by law! I remember how proud I used to be of that, when talking to Western Europeans; but now for a second and even a third year, we haev executions, executions, executions, unceasingly!
I take up today's paper.
To-day, the 9 May, it is something awful. The paper contains these few words: "To-day in Kherson on the Strelbitsky Field, twenty peasants were hung for an attack made with intent to rob, on a landed proprietor's estate in the Elizabetgrad district.[1](...)".

Genres: Russia, Classics

5 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1908

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[R. Reddebrek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but powerful condemnation of the death penalty and a government that uses it and a society that tolerates its government using it.

Its very passionate and a little wild but its all the more powerful for it. Written in 1908 shortly after reading in the newspaper that twenty peasants had been hung. He's disgusted both that the Russian government and its ruling class are content to allow the conditions for crimes of desperation to occur and that they are quite content with resorting to such bloody and sickeningly routine methods of dealing with the social consequences of their system.

*It turned out to be an error, and only twelve peasants had been executed. Tolstoy notes this and was thankful that eight people were not killed but was glad of the error as the number shocked him into response.

[Ilya StBuch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Дед маразматик
Лучше бы ты мог молчать, а не занимался пустым морализаторством

[Delfina González · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impresionante. Qué triste me resulta, que sea tan atemporal. 💔

[Laman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cri de coeur...