Non-Activity

"Non-Activity" is an 1893 article by Leo Tolstoy[1] and also the term used to describe Tolstoy's form of anarchist and pacifist thought. This thinking of Tolstoy's was influenced by wuwei (無為, "inaction"), a Taoist concept of finding victory by withdrawing from action.[2][3] Sometimes Tolstoy's "non-activity" is translated as "under-activity"[4] and others have called it "non-violent non-cooperation."[5]

Content

Maxim Gorky has described Tolstoy's "misty preaching of 'non-activity', of 'non-resistance to evil', the doctrine of passivism" as being the result of the natural fermentation of old Russian blood with Mongolian fatalism.[6][7] According to Henri Troyat and Alexander Lukin, Tolstoy found the ideals of ancient, Chinese philosophy to nicely contrast against the over-industrialized and overly-scientific achievements of the Western Capitalist world.[8][9] This admiration was cross-cultural, as Chinese and Japanese anarchists had preferred Tolstoy's pure, agrarian Anarchism to be superior to the scientific, modernized anarchism of Peter Kropotkin or Mikhail Bakunin.[10] Tolstoy even translated Laozi into Russian.[11] This translation was made from a German and French text of Tao Te Ching, and this project took Tolstoy a decade.[12] According to Harold D. Roth, it was finally completed in 1893-4.[13]

History

This work was translated to French as "Le non-agir".[3]

See also

References
  1. Milivoy S. Stanoyevich (1916). Tolstoy's Theory of Social Reform. University of California, Berkeley. p. 47.
  2. Mims, Edwin; Bassett, John Spencer; Wannamaker, William Hane; Glasson, William Henry; Boyd, William Kenneth; Few, William Preston, eds. (1951). The South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 50. Duke University Press. p. 156.
  3. Revue Canadienne-americaine D'etudes Slaves (1972). Canadian-American Slavic Studies. Vol. 6. University of Pittsburgh. p. 333.
  4. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (2017). Tolstoy's Quest for God. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781351471756.
  5. Ananta Kumar Giri, ed. (2021). Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures. Springer Singapore. p. 141. ISBN 9789811571220.
  6. Maxim Gorky (1920). Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Vol. 1. Freeman. p. 512.
  7. Maxim Gorky (1920). Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. B. W. Huebsch. p. 39.
  8. Alexander Lukin (2016). The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia's Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations Since the Eighteenth Century. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781315290515.
  9. Henri Troyat (2001). Tolstoy. Grove Press. p. 440. ISBN 9780802137685.
  10. Germaine A. Hoston (2021). The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan. Princeton University Press. p. 158. ISBN 9780691225418.
  11. 老子, 韦利, Arthur Waley, 陈鼓应, 傅惠生 (1999). Huisheng Fu, 傅惠生 (ed.). Laozi. Translated by Arthur Waley, Guying Chen, 陈鼓应, 韦利. 湖南人民出版社. ISBN 9787543820890.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  12. Sho Konishi (2020). Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan. Brill. p. 112. ISBN 9781684175314.
  13. Harold David Roth, Angus Charles Graham (2003). A Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. University of Hawaii Press. p. 135. ISBN 9780824826437.
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