From another point of view than the one stated, I also came to the same conclusion. Recollecting my connection with the town-poor during this period, I saw that one cause which prevented me from helping them was their insincerity and falseness. They all considered me, not as an individual but merely as a means to an end. I felt I could not become intimate with them; I thought I did not perhaps understand how to do so; but without truthfulness, no help was possible. How can one help a man who does not tell all his circumstances? Formerly I accused the poor of this (it is so natural to accuse others), but one word spoken by a remarkable man, Sutaief, who was then on a visit at my house, cleared up the difficulty, and showed me wherein lay the cause of my failure. I remember that even then what he said made a deep impression on me; but I did not understand its full meaning until afterwards. It happened that while in the full ardor of my self-deception I was at my sister's hou...
Transcribed from the 1887 Tomas Y. Crowell edition by David Price WHAT TO DO? THOUGHTS EVOKED BY THE CENSUS OF MOSCOW by COUNT LYOF N. TOLSTOÏ translated from the russian By ISABEL F. HAPGOOD NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 13 Astor Place 1887 Copyright, 1887, By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. electrotyped and printed BY RAND AVERY COMPANY, boston. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. Books which are prohibited by the Russian Censor are not always inaccessible. An enterprising publishing-house in Geneva makes a specialty of supplying the natural craving of man for forbidden fruit, under which heading some of Count L. N. Tolstoy’s essays belong. These essays circulate in Russia in manuscript; and it is from one of these manuscripts, which fell into the hands of the Geneva firm, that the first half of the present translation has been made. It i...