Letter to a Pole

by Leo Tolstoy

Marian �dmundovich:

I have received your letter and have hastened to read your article in the Northern Messenger.� Thank you very much for having pointed it out to me.� The article is beautiful, and I learned from it much that is new and a joy to me.� I learned also about Mickiewicz and Towianski.� I used to ascribe their religious mood to the qualities that these two people alone, possessed, but from your article I learned that they were only the originators of the true Christian movement, which, having been evoked by patriotism, continues until the present time, and is profoundly touching in its exaltation and sincerity.

My article, Patriotism and Christianity, called forth very many retorts.� Philosophers and publicists, Russian, French, German, and Austrian, retorted to me, and so do you.� And all the retorts, like yours, reduce themselves to this: that my condemnations of patriotism are just only in relation to bad patriotism, but have no foundation if referred to good and useful patriotism.� But no one has so far taken the trouble to explain in what this good and useful patriotism consists and in what way it differs from the bad patriotism.

You write in your letter, �Besides the patriotism of conquest and of the hatred of man, characteristic of the powerful nations, there exists also an entirely different patriotism of the enslaved nations, who are striving after the defense of their native faith and tongue against the enemy.�� You define good patriotism by this condition of oppression.� But oppression and the power of the nations do not make any difference in the essence of what is called patriotism.� A fire will always be a burning and dangerous fire, whether it burns in a pyre or glows in a match.� Patriotism is generally understood to be a preferential love for one�s own nation, just as egoism is understood to be a preferential love for one�s own personality.� It is hard to imagine how such a preference of one nation over another can be considered a good and desirable quality.� If you say that patriotism is more excusable in an oppressed person than in the oppressor, just as the manifestation of egoism is more excusable in a man who is being strangled than in one who is not troubled by anyone, it will not be possible not to agree with you.� Patriotism cannot change its quality according to whether it is manifested in the oppressed man or in the oppressor.� This preference of one nation over all the others, like egoism, can never be good.

But patriotism is not only a bad quality; it is also an irrational doctrine.

By the word �patriotism� is meant not only an immediate, involuntary love of one�s nation and preference of it over all the others, but also the doctrine that such a love and preference are good and useful.� Such a doctrine is particularly irrational among the Christian nations.� It is irrational, not only because it contradicts the fundamental meaning of Christ�s teaching, but also because Christianity, attaining in its own way all that toward which patriotism is striving, makes patriotism superfluous, unnecessary, and interfering, like a lamp in daylight.

A man who, like Krasinski, believes that �God�s church is not this or that place, not this or that rite, but the whole planet, and all imaginable relations of individuals and nations among themselves� can no longer be a patriot, because he will perform all those things which patriotism can ask of him in the name of Christianity.� Patriotism, for example, asks of its disciple that he sacrifice his life for the good of his countrymen; but Christianity demands a similar sacrifice of one�s life for the good of all men, and so such a sacrifice for the men of one�s own nation is just a narrower version of the Christian demand.

You write of those terrible acts of violence that the savage, stupid, and cruel Russian authorities are perpetrating on the faith and language of the Poles, and this you adduce as some kind of a reason for a patriotic activity.� But I do not see it.� To be indignant at such acts of violence and to counteract them with our whole might, we need not be a Pole or a patriot, but only a Christian.

In the given case, for example, I, who am not a Pole, will vie with any Pole as to the degree of my disgust and indignation on account of the savage and stupid measures of the people connected with the government, which are practiced against the faith and language of the Poles.� I will also vie with anyone in the desire to counteract these measures, not because I love Catholicism more than any other religion, or the Polish language more than any other, but because I try to be a Christian.� And so, to prevent these things from happening in Poland, or in Alsace, or in Bohemia, we do not need the diffusion of patriotism, but the diffusion of true Christianity.

We can say that we do not care to know Christianity, and then we can laud patriotism; but the moment we recognize Christianity, or even the consciousness of the equality of men and the respect for human dignity which arise from it, there is no place left for patriotism.� What surprises me more than anything else in connection with it is how the advocates of patriotism in the oppressed nation, no matter how perfect and refined they may take it to be, do not see the harmfulness of patriotism to their own purposes.

In what name have all these acts of violence been perpetrated on language and faith in Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Alsace, Bohemia, the Jews in Russia, and wherever such acts have been committed?� Only in the name of that patriotism which you defend.

Ask our savage Russifiers of Poland and of the Baltic Provinces, and the persecutors of the Jews, why they do all that they do.� They will tell you that this is done for the defense of their own faith and language.� They will tell you that, if they do not do so, they will allow their own faith and language to suffer � that the Russians will turn into Poles, Germans, or Jews.

If there existed no doctrine as to patriotism being something good, there would never exist, at the end of the nineteenth century, men so base as to have courage to do all the base things that they are doing now.� But now the learned � the most savage persecutor of faith in your country is an ex-professor � have a point of support in patriotism.� They know history, they know about all those useless horrors of the persecutions of language and faith, but thanks to the doctrine about patriotism, they have a justification.� Patriotism gives them a point of support, while Christianity takes it away from under their feet.� And so the conquered nations, which are suffering from oppression, must destroy patriotism, tear down its theoretical foundations, ridicule it, and not extol it.

In defending patriotism, people speak of the individuality of the nationalities, saying that patriotism has the salvation of the individuality of the nation for its aim, and the individuality of the nations is assumed as an indispensable condition of progress.� But, in the first place, who has said that this individuality is an indispensable condition of progress?� This has not been proved in any way, and we have no right to accept this arbitrary proposition as an axiom.� In the second place, even if we admit that this is so, the nation�s means for manifesting its individuality will not consist in trying to manifest it, but, on the contrary, in forgetting its individuality and employing all its forces to do what it feels itself most competent to do and most destined for, just as the individual man will manifest his individuality, not by caring for it, but by forgetting it and employing all his forces and abilities in doing that toward which he is drawn by his nature.� Therefore, people who are working for the support of their community should be doing all kinds of work in all kinds of places.� Let each do what is most necessary for the community, according to the best of his strength and knowledge, and let him work with all his might, and they will all involuntarily work differently with different instruments and in different places.

One of the most common of the sophisms that are used for the defense of what is immoral consists in intentionally confusing what is with what ought to be, and in beginning to speak of one thing and then substituting another for it.� This sophism is most frequently employed in relation to patriotism, so that a Pole is nearer and dearer than anyone else to a Pole, a German to a German, and a Russian to a Russian.� Following from this and in consequence of historical causes and bad education, the men of one nation unconsciously experience ill will toward the people of another nation.� All this takes place, but the recognition of what takes place, like the recognition of the fact that every man loves himself more than any one else, can in no way prove that this must be so.� On the contrary, the whole work of all humanity and of every individual man consists only in suppressing these prejudices and ill wills, in struggling against them, and in consciously acting toward other nations and toward the people of other nations just as one would act in relation to his countrymen.� It is quite superfluous for us to trouble ourselves about patriotism as a feeling that it is desirable to teach to every man.� God, or Nature, has taken care of this feeling without us so that it is inherent in every man, and we have no need to trouble ourselves about learning it and teaching it to others.� What we ought to trouble ourselves about is not patriotism, but how to introduce the light that is within us into life, and thus to change it and bring it nearer to the ideal that stands before us.� This ideal, which at the present time is standing before every man who is enlightened with the true light of Christ, does not consist in the reestablishment of Poland, Bohemia, Ireland, or Armenia.� It does not consist in the preservation of the unity and greatness of Russia, England, Germany, or Austria.� On the contrary, it consists in the destruction of the unity and greatness of Russia, England, and Germany, and in the abolition of all those force-using, anti-Christian combinations called states, which are in the way of all true progress and beget the sufferings of the oppressed and vanquished nations � all that evil from which modern humanity is suffering.� This destruction is possible only through real enlightenment and through the recognition that, before being Russians, Poles, and Germans, we are men, disciples of the same teacher, sons of the same father, and brothers among ourselves.� The best representatives of the Polish people understand this, as you have beautifully shown in your article, and this is understood from day to day by an ever-greater number of men.

Thus the days of governmental violence are numbered, and the liberation of not only the conquered nations, but also of the oppressed laborers is near � if we ourselves do not defer the time of this liberation by participating in the governments� acts of violence.� But the recognition of patriotism, no matter of what kind, as a good quality, and the encouragement of the nations to it, are among the chief impediments in attaining the ideals that are standing before us.

I thank you once more for your kind letter and the excellent article, and for the opportunity that you gave me to once more verify, think out, and express my ideas on patriotism.�� Accept the assurance of my respect.

September 10,1895

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