Communist attitudes to Anna Karenina

[kev67]

I finished part 3 yesterday. It is interesting about Levin's attempts to improve farming practices and his experiments in profit sharing with his peasant farmers. He is frustrated because his hired workers will not buy into his ideas, such as using iron ploughs, etc. Whatever his instructions, his labourers will circumvent them if they can, because they are used to their old ways. His brother, Nikolai criticized him for stripping off Communist ideas but not going far enough. It was quite interesting to read that Communist ideas had already taken root. Then there are these zemstvo local councils that had recently been introduced. Serfs had only been emancipated about 20 years earlier.

I wondered what Lenin and the other Communist revolutionaries would have made of Anna Karenina. What would they think of Levin?

[Danik 2016]

What is interesting is that the communist in this case is the land owner, while the workers, who would be the great beneficiaries, mistrust the arrangement. One doubt, does the book already use the term communism ? It is so long ago that I read the book (but there was a film one or two years ago that focused on this part of the story).
In Faust II finished in 1831, there is also a suggestion of an agrarious community, with donation of the land to the workers. But the episode is ironic. It is the last dream of an old and blind Faust. He issues his orders and dies thinking that his project was executed but Mephistofeles takes care that it isn´t. Anyway the ideals of communism seem to go back to the 19C and maybe earlier.

[kev67]

I am not sure Levin was a communist though. As he explains to his brother, he hopes everyone will be better off by adopting his methods, including himself. There will be some profit sharing, but he still hopes to be rich, at least enough to have the capital to run his estate.

This is what makes me wonder whether Lenin, Trotsky et al. would have had Tolstoy put against a wall and shot. I suspect not.

[Danik 2016]

I am not so sure about that. After all Tolstoy was a nobleman.

[mona amon]

I think they liked him, at least Lenin did. He was a cultural icon, and he was against private property, though from a Christian perspective. Lenin wrote an article about him - "Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution," which sounds quite positive but I'm not sure what he says in it. If he'd actually lived during the worst part of the Soviet era, who knows, he may have been lined up and shot along with all the other writers.

[Danik 2016]

Thanks for the indication, Mona. The article,as one would expect, reflects Lenin´s political concerns: "Tolstoy is original, because the sum total of his views, taken as a whole, happens to express the specific features of our revolution as a peasant bourgeois revolution."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/sep/11.htm