I'm listening to Diane Rehm interviewing Christopher Plummer on the occasion of the publication of his memoirs. He mentions that he plays Leo Tolstoy in a film which, according to IMDB, is in post production, due for release in 2009. (I missed part of the interview, so don't know all details.) The film title is "The Last Station" and it is based on a novel published in 1990, and in paperback in 2007.
The novel was reviewed this way by Publishers Weekly:
There is also a review in the NYT of 7/17/90, which ends with
As for his portrait of Tolstoy, Mr. Parini plays down the raging conflicts (religious, sexual and philosophical) that animated the latter part of his life, and instead makes him the still center of this book. While the other characters are scheming, arguing and maneuvering, while the press and sychophantic supporters vie noisily for his attention, Tolstoy himself sits alone in his study, quietly contemplating the great questions of faith and justice. We are shown letters he wrote to Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw in which he discusses God and love and evil; and we are given an excerpt from ''What Then Must We Do?'' in which he sets forth his own guilty observations about poverty in Moscow.
In the end, Tolstoy decides to leave the chaos at home, setting off, at the age of 82, to find a purer, more spiritual life. ''My position in this house has become intolerable,'' he writes his wife. ''Along with everything else, I can no longer abide these luxurious conditions. What I am now doing is what old people have commonly done - leave their worldly life behind to spend their last days in peace and solitude.''
Why am I bringing this up? Leo Tolstoy was a great admirer of the ideas of Henry George. He died in 1910, about 13 years after HG. The following year, Bolton Hall, an American Georgist, published a book called "What Tolstoy Taught," with the approval of Tolstoy, which described things as Tolstoy saw them. Henry George's most famous book was Progress and Poverty.
For more information, you might see these pages:
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/lebrun_victor_on_tolstoy_and_george.html
http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/Tolstoy.htm which includes this:
I read through your letter and I find your thoughts about land to be correct. The land is God's. It should not and cannot belong to anyone. All people have an equal right to it and the only concern is how to distribute it. ... Many people like you truthfully say that the land cannot be anyone's property. Genuine property is determined only by labor and people must work in harmony on it. Many truly understand that to distribute the land among the people is important and wise. These matters were resolved in a very just form by the American scholar Henry George. . . . [Whoever uses the land] would pay. . . to society i.e., to the government for community needs. . . . There will be no domestic taxes or foreign duties, i.e., there will not be requisitions or taking anything away from people's work, because all taxes will be replaced by this land payment. Henry George was wise concerning this. . . . The injustice of landownership is now becoming as obvious to people as what occurred fifty years ago when the evil of serfdom became blatant. It could not last long, and when the time came, it was abolished. The slavery of people and the stealing from their labor through landownership cannot long remain in the same manner.42
For over a century, a single tax movement in the United States and abroad has been devoted much in the same manner as Tolstoy to the alleviation of economic and social injustice. George's philosophy still inspires the hearts of a small but active body of men and women attracted to its simple reverence for nature, its exaltation of the individual, its lack of compromise with injustice, and its minimalist solution to social ills.
39. Tolstoy to V. F. Chertkov, February 24, 1889 PSS, 85: Social Problems was read before Progress and Poverty.
40. Tolstoy to L. D. Urosov, February 25, 1894, PSS, 63: 212. According to one of Tolstoy's Russian biographers, it was the introduction to Progress and Poverty that produced "the strongest and most favorable impression," especially those lines in which George declares:"I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us in the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization today women faint and little children moan. . . . If the conclusion that we reach run counter to our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they challenge institutions that have long been deemed wise and natural, let us not turn back"
N. N. Gusev. Lev Nokolaevich Tolstoi: materiali l biografii s 1881 po 1885 god (L. N. Tolstoy: material for a biography from 1881 to 1885) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Nauka," 1970), 387.
41. Tolstoy to Ernest Crosby, Nov. 24, 1894, in R. F. Christian, ed/. Tolstoy's Letters, 1880-1910. vol 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978), 512/ Economic Progress was unthinkable without an inheritance tax, a tax on the wealthy, and the application of Georgist ideas (Tolstoy, PSS, 53: 97-98).
42. Tolstoy to Rgotinov, Aug. 29, 1908, PSS, 78:215.
for more about Tolstoy, see An Anthology of Tolstoy's Spiritual Economics, edited by Kenneth Wenzer
*What is the Single Tax? Check out http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Single_Tax.html
Comments