"Non-Activity" is an 1893 article by

Leo Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Tolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; ,Throughout Tolstoy's whole life, his name was written as using Reforms of Russian orthography#The post-revolution re ...

and also the term used to describe Tolstoy's form of

anarchist Anarchism is a political philosophy and Political movement, movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or Social hierarchy, hierarchy, primarily targeting the state (polity), state and capitalism. A ...

and

pacifist Pacifism is the opposition to war or violence. The word ''pacifism'' was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901. A related term is ''a ...

thought. This thinking of Tolstoy's was influenced by wuwei (無為, "inaction"), a

Taoist Taoism or Daoism (, ) is a diverse philosophical and religious tradition indigenous to China, emphasizing harmony with the Tao ( zh, p=dào, w=tao4). With a range of meaning in Chinese philosophy, translations of Tao include 'way', 'road', ...

concept of finding victory by withdrawing from action. Sometimes Tolstoy's "non-activity" is translated as "under-activity" and others have called it "non-violent non-cooperation."

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Maxim Gorky Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (; – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (; ), was a Russian and Soviet writer and proponent of socialism. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an aut ...

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. According to

Henri Troyat Henri Troyat (born Lev Aslanovich Tarasov; – 2 March 2007) was a Russian-French writer, biographer, historian, and novelist. Early life Lev Aslanovich Tarasov (, ''Lev Aslanovich Tarasov'') was born in Moscow to parents of Armenian heritage. ...

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. This admiration was cross-cultural, as Chinese and Japanese anarchists had preferred Tolstoy's pure, agrarian Anarchism over the scientific, modernized anarchism of

Peter Kropotkin Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended the Page Corps and later s ...

Mikhail Bakunin Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin. Sometimes anglicized to Michael Bakunin. ( ; – 1 July 1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist. He is among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major figure in the revolutionary socialist, s ...

. Tolstoy even translated

Laozi Laozi (), also romanized as Lao Tzu #Name, among other ways, was a semi-legendary Chinese philosophy, Chinese philosopher and author of the ''Tao Te Ching'' (''Laozi''), one of the foundational texts of Taoism alongside the ''Zhuangzi (book) ...

into Russian. This translation was made from a German and French text of

Tao Te Ching The ''Tao Te Ching'' () or ''Laozi'' is a Chinese classic text and foundational work of Taoism traditionally credited to the sage Laozi, though the text's authorship and date of composition and compilation are debated. The oldest excavated por ...

, and this project took Tolstoy a decade. According to Harold D. Roth, it was finally completed in 1893–4.

History

This work was translated to French as ''"Le non-agir"''.

References

Archive.org The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applic ...

1891 short stories Works by Leo Tolstoy {{1890s-story-stub

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History

See also

References

External links