Старая добрая Англия и Святая Русь/Merrie England and Saint Russia

Common and different

The very thought of writing this work came to me, when I was reading A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND of Mister Chesterton – or, perhaps, Master Chesterton, for he is a real master of the word. As he notes himself, the word mister was derived from the word master as a result of “losing memory”, when people in England ceased paying attention to such trifles as the real meaning of this or that word and started, therefore, to pronounce the abbreviation Mr. carelessly, so that in the stead of master with long [a:] no vowel sound was pronounced and the word was uttered like [mster].

Another story is that of the word holiday, which, actually, once upon a time used to be a holy day, or the word shire-reeve, which later transformed to sheriff. Following this direction, a language gets worn out, or, on the contrary, develops – whichever is preferred – and along with the language changes human mind. Well, this is simple. But one day it all becomes part of History – because it does not live any longer. It becomes an epoch, “gone with the wind”. And long after people, like historians and philosophers, try abstractly to reconstruct the epoch, guessing what it looked like. This process is likely to happen in all times and to all nations. Now, the goal of this work is to compare England, as it is represented by Master Chesterton, and Russia, taken in my vision.

This is not going to be a comparative history – but a comparative historiosophy, that is philosophy of history, for we may call Chesterton’s work HISTORIOSOPHY OF ENGLAND, however unusual it may sound. Historiosophy implies overthinking certain events and facts, defining their place in the historical movement. Very often one has to plunge deep to catch the connection between two phenomena. As Mr. Chesterton underlined, quoting the words of Kipling, “what can he know of England, who only England knows”. This is the cornerstone of historiosophy. Everything is interconnected in this world, and such two far-flung countries as England and Russia are not an exception. I can even say (within the context of the subject): what do you know of Russia, if you don’t know England, and vice versa.

I began with the word-reconstruction, and, I believe, it is important, because a language reflects and accumulates, so to say records, phenomena taking place in the consciousness of a people. The above mentioned “losing memory” process, reflected and recorded in the language, was definitely subconscious. There was nothing of the will there, it happened just because it happened. Nowadays we can trace a counter-process – creating new words on purpose, often in order to confuse the people. The principle is the same as in “losing memory”, but direction is different. There was a famous band called THE BEATLES. They changed one letter in the word beetles and the meaning was lost, though everybody understands what it is all about. Here we have an on-purpose attempt to influence History via the language – and to say broader – via the Word. The same happened to the famous company SONY, which was even awarded for “the contribution to the English Language”! All they did was the word sony, that was derived from sonny, and the word walkman. Anyhow, this process is counter to the one we are interested now. Then there was no on-purpose, direct will in changing the spelling, and via the spelling – the mentality. It was History that influenced it. I think, it would be nearer to the truth to say, that then people more “tried to live their lives”, rather than they “tried to do History”. Thus, life was much more natural in its very core, for today there’s a tendency “to do History”, rather than “to live one’s life”. The politicians of today “are doing History”, when, for example, waging a war somewhere in Serbia or Persian Gulf, rather than protecting their countries or the supreme Truth, as is declared. And of course nothing of the kind can be observed in the Middle Ages, when Richard Lion’s Heart, among other crusaders, went to Palestine to fight for the Truth – as he imagined it – and they seemed happy to die on the Holy Land for it. They, probably, never thought even, that they were the “doers of History”. This phenomenon is unique, and I think it belongs to the New Time, as it did belong to the Ancient Time of Rome, the time of secular society and secular mind. The man is no longer capable of “living his life”, he is possessed with the idea of “changing the world for the better”. It became the sign of our epoch. And, being possessed, we are probably missing something that is subconscious and organic.

In Russian we have the same fact of “losing memory”, which is, in my opinion, even more crucial and at the same time more impressing and even shocking. There’s a modern word “spasibo” meaning “thank you”, that didn’t exist long before. To be more precise, it “almost existed”, though with a bit different filling. Actually, it was an expression. Of course, it was of a church origin and was used by the church-minded people.  And of course at those times all the people were church-minded. They used, thus, the expression “spasi Bog” in the direct sense – “save God” or, to put it in English correctly, “let God save you”. Whenever one person wanted to thank another, he (or she) would say this phrase “save God”, which was more like wishing something definite and certain. And it should be noted, that both talking persons accepted the phrase directly and absolutely seriously. Today in churches people use a synonymic expression “save Lord”. So, gradually, along with the secular processes, that are alike everywhere, the mentality underwent changes as well. “Save God” began to be pronounced automatically, without considering the essence. The last sound fell off, and two words became one “spasibo” – “savego”. The Russian Language “recorded” this change, and today in quick speech we even pronounce it like “pasibo” – “avego”. Moreover, this historical trick lets us address God, when thanking Him, using this word: “thank You, my God – savego, my God”! There’s another word, which “history” is even more impressing – “krestyane”, originally meaning “Christians”, but later transformed into “peasants”. Soon after Russia was baptized, but not later than after a century and a half, Russians started calling themselves Christians – “christiane” or “chrestiane”. Then, in the New Time, this name was left with peasants only as their official name, evidently because of their being faithful to the tradition of their ancestors.  Well, these are language tricks, and it’s hard to say whether they are for the better or the worse. And still in the Russian Language we have a “relic”, left since “Christian times” – we still call Sunday Resurrection. “See you on Sunday” will sound like “see you on Resurrection”.

When I said that people today are obsessed with the idea of “changing the world for the better”, I, of course, didn’t mean, that the people of the Middle Ages in England or in Russia did not want such changes. It would be logical to suppose that they wanted certain things to be changed – naturally for the better. But that “better” needs explaining. The motive of life then and the motive of life now are absolutely different. What is the goal of our life today? For the most part it is the so-called “American dream”. In the Middle Ages it was salvation. Salvation of one’s soul. Everything that worked for and helped the salvation of the soul was considered to be “for the better”, whatever didn’t – “for the worse”. This is the heart of that Christian epoch, one for all parts of the Christian universe. What it is – Christian universe – of that will be spoken further on. Now, what is “the better” for us today? At least not the salvation of the soul. But without realizing this we will not understand either Merrie England or Saint Russia. It is the paradox, that the “children” not only do not follow their “parents”, but profess something, which totally opposes the outlook of their “parents”.  

There was something in those times that led the people of Russia to the point, where they called their Land “saint”, and the people of England – “merrie”. It will be a mistake to think, that Russians must have been very proud, naming their own homeland “saint”. To tell the truth, we still use this word, still say “Saint Russia”, meaning, however, something very definite. It is not a metaphor, it’s real. We use this expression just as we would use any other – “in Saint Russia”, “in America”, “in England”, though I am sure, that no Englishman would say nowadays: “in Merrie England”. That’s the difference between Russia and England, that Saint Russia is still a “real reality”, and Merrie England has gone down to Lethe. There’s a paradox about it in Russia: Saint Russia can be found within official Russia, as she has always been the heart of Russia, as she has always existed within the Russia’s Empire, the Soviet Union, and as she lives now within the Russia’s Federation and some neighbouring post Soviet countries. To travel around Saint Russia means to visit her “saint places”: her churches, her temples, her monasteries, that are numerous and very well known to the Russian people – to the population of Saint Russia. It all shows that Saint Russia is a living being, and, as we believe, an eternal phenomenon, because whatever regime rules and whatever ideology is imposed from above, Russia exists because there’s Saint Russia that makes her heart beat. In this respect it is possible to state, that Russia is always the same – in all times – for there’s Saint Russia that cannot change, just because it is Saint, and something which is saint is, of course, everlasting, that is unchangeable.

As a state Russia is known since the ninth century, but it became Saint probably at the end of the 13-th century or at least in the 14-th, for she already was known as Saint then. The reason of it could be this. By the end of the first half of the 13-th century (1240) Russia was assailed by the united forces of Mongols (and partly Tartars). This led to the fact, that Russia became part of the Mongol Empire – formally till 1480. But already in the second half of the 13-th century there appeared a legend or a romance about Grad Kitezh – e.g. “burg (and city) of Kitezh”.  They say this burg was never conquered by the impious enemy, for it went under water of a lake with all its population. They say it still exists there and can be seen only by the “pure souls”. This lake is real, it is located in Nizhny Novgorod region. People still go there to pray and there are even cross processions around the lake. The legend could become “a push” and maybe just then the name Saint appeared. Anyway, it is quite possible to suppose that for about 700 years Russia exists as Saint. This name became so close to every Russian, that today I cannot even imagine my country without it. So, the name indicates not the pride of Russians, but their want of sanctity, their longing to reach “into the Kingdom”. Saint Russia is our archetype, she is our soul – and that should be kept in mind.

Now, Merrie England means something definite as well. The chapter about Merry England Chesterton called “The meaning of Merrie England”. Though he doesn’t at all speak about why it was merrie. We can suspect why, considering nursery tales or rhymes, for they bear the spirit of those times. By the way, the very word merrie used to mean pleasant. Thus Merrie England can be paraphrased as Pleasant England or Good Old England, which is more precise. And we must try to comprehend why it was considered merry, that is why it seemed – or really was – pleasant, good.

Of course, we should not idealize any time, any epoch – just because we are all the same in all times – we are all not perfect. And as a result of this imperfection nothing can be viewed as ideal, for all the times are full of bloodshed – notwithstanding the very fact that our heroes and rulers might have realized it deep within. When we read Shakespeare we cannot but notice numerous corpses filling his works. Though, probably, it might be presumed as well that these piles of dead bodies did not seem then as outrageous, as they do today. It was sort of the norm of life, though not the most pleasant one, of course. When we read, for instance, about the kings and the populace gathering at the town square to watch the auto dafe of a witch or a heretic we cannot help the growing of the “noble wrath” in us. But those people in Europe seemed to enjoy such things – without relishing them. In general violence was and is one of the eternal components of history. And the thing is – how you tackle it. It is evident that we cannot do without violence in whatever form it takes. And it is evident that people of the times we are talking about considered violence to be the weapon to protect Christian virtues – as they understood them – though again there were cases of abuse.

From this point there arises a question – if it was so bloody, why and how can it all be called merrie without being pervertious? For sometimes it may seem not simply severe, but inhuman – as we understand it now. Thinking this, we, however, have to reevaluate all the outlook of those people. They could enjoy the auto dafe of a heretic and give alms to the eccentric poor. They severely fought the heathens and were generous to each other. Well, it was a special civilization, and England once was part of it. In the chivalric time England even became an example of the knight image – with the figure of Richard I at head – right until today. And this civilization lived according to the laws it thought to be good or, which is more exact, given by God. They thought their goal was to serve God and to build their life in accordance with the teaching of the church they acknowledged and Christian virtues.

As Mr. Chesterton says, at the beginning of the Middle Ages the people in England were not yet English in the later meaning of the word – but they were for sure Christian (catholic). Here is the basis for the whole following history with its breakdown in Richard II.

The problem of the royal power in Middle Ages should be singled out, for it created the problem of barons or new aristocrats that usurped that very royal power, which seemed evident till a certain moment. The background of this baronizm is to be sought in the second half of the first millennium, when there appeared such a thing as commendation and benefition. European lands were full of landlords of every caliber – and kings were the largest. They were subordinated to the emperor, and in the perspective to the Pope, who would give their vassals the right to possess lands and the people on those lands. So, by the time of the Norman Conquest this situation had already existed long enough, and that’s why Wilhelm demanded direct vows of the local barons personally to him. The thing is that small lords served their bigger ones and those served the biggest, and the biggest – the king. And the small lords ignored the biggest ones and even the king, for they were the servants of the bigger lords. That is why such a state wasn’t safe at all, because any local baron was free from the king and the latter couldn’t do anything about it. This was typical all over Europe and that’s why Wilhelm subordinated England and established central power there. It was the first step and it was to be continued by his successors. And as Master Chesterton thinks, this trend broke down with Richard II, when English barons became stronger than the king. In Russian history there once happened the same, but the king started sort of a crusade against his aristocracy – and finally he won though the country became weak after it, which led to a chaos in the near future. The name of the king is well known – Ivan Grozny, that is wrongly translated as The Terrible. I think it would be better to put it as Ivan (John) The Stormlike, for the word groza means the storm. In general, translation is often wrong when speaking of Russia, for the same has to be done with the worldly known Krasnaya Ploshad’, rendered as  The Red Square – when it should be The Beautiful Square, according to the old meaning of the word  krasny. Another story is that of the parliament and so let’s turn to the history of England in the vision of Chesterton. Here he gives us a broad picture of historical background.

“The institutions which affected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in one practical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There may have been better societies, and assuredly we have not to look far for worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We cannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of that epoch, even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons with the plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local government always comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merely imposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, are necessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or rather a pattern. The mediaevals not only had self-government, but their self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of state approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already in existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recent centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a thing that breaks things--even if they admit it is right to break them.  But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces.  And if the modern skeptic in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains of my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve. It is enough to reply that the very word "masterpiece" is borrowed from the terminology of the mediaeval craftsmen. But such points in the Guild System can be considered a little later; here we are only concerned with the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social institutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silent rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions”.

“There had appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something unknown to the august civilization of the Roman Empire - a peasantry. At the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the mediaeval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the religious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no man of them has reaped his reward in this world.  Countless Clarksons and innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame, worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe; and the vast system of slavery vanished”.

“It must be remembered that over a great part, and especially very important parts, of the whole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a mystical communism and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only obtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount of freedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the development are very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long in the intermediate status of a serf.  This meant that while the land was entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to the support of the land.  He could not be evicted; he could not even, in the modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merely that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned.  At the end he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the lord that owned him, but the land.  It is hardly unsafe to suggest that in this (by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the very fixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inherited something of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in a competitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedom from him. He found himself among neighbours who already regarded his presence as normal and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among whom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By a trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner had become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was almost true that an Englishman's house was his castle, because it had been built strong enough to be his dungeon”.

“The other notable element was this:  that when the produce of the land began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord, the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One the serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other they enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose the momentously important mediaeval institutions of the Common Land, owned side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The mediaevals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists; but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of the dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period that our romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests and the outlaws den, but never describe him as falling back on the common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediaevalism believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social justice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that slowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant proprietor”.

“Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by the egalitarian vigilance of the Guilds.  It is hard to find any term to measure the distance between this system and modern society; one can only approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily life is littered with a debris of the Middle Ages,
especially of dead words which no longer carry their meaning”.

“The very vital importance of the word "Master" is this. A Guild was, very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own employer.  That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would join the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in his own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But the word "employer" marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use of the word "Master" quite inexact. A master meant something quite other and greater than a "boss." It meant a master of the work, where it now means only a master of the workmen.  It is an elementary character of Capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a landowner have even seen the landscape, that the owner of a gold mine may be interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railway travel exclusively in balloons. He may be a more successful capitalist if he has a hobby of his own business; he is often a more successful capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; but economically he can control the business because he is a capitalist, not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest grade in the Guild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of the business.  To take the term created by the colleges in the same epoch, all the mediaeval bosses were Masters of Arts. The other grades were the journeyman and the apprentice; but like the corresponding degrees at the universities, they were grades through which every common man could pass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and not castes”.

“These Companies support large charities and often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is quite different from that of the old charities of the Guilds.  The aim of the Guild charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was to resist inequality, or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the last generation would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure, not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat.  It was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like their shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row of little shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growth of a big shop like the growth of a dragon”.

“The old Guilds, with the same object of equality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of payment and treatment which is a point of complaint against the modern Trades Unions. But they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do, upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world in the corners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken glass. There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distant his own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time a nameless but universal artistic touch in the moulding of the very tools of life”.

“That the most mediaeval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do not fight for the same ideal of aesthetic finish is true and certainly tragic; but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the tragedy. The Trades Unions are confederations of men without property, seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character of their labour. The Guilds were confederations of men with property, seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is, of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properly be said to exist at all.  We should not speak of a negro community in which most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We should not conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors, and three men had harems. A married community means a community where most people are married; not a community where one or two people are very much married. A propertied community means a community where most people have property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in fact the Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and peasants) were much richer than can be realized even from the fact that the Guilds protected the possession of houses, tools, and just payment.  The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of the period, when all deductions have been made, of course, for the different value of the actual coinage.  When a man could get a goose or a gallon of ale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is in no way affected by the name of those coins. Even where the individual wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large--the wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of the monastic estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequent history of England”.

“The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of things like the Guild system, and not the system from the government”.

“But whichever party may have been predominant, it was the heads of the Guild who became the heads of the town, and not vice versa”.

“The other point is that it was from these municipal groups already in existence that the first men were chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great mediaeval experiments: the Parliament”.

“We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I, when they first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on local taxation, called "two burgesses" from every town. If we had read a little more closely, those simple words would have given away the whole secret of the lost medieval civilisation. We had only to ask what burgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately have discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out of which the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonder that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old title of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective corporations of which we hear much in our books of history, the explanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad.  It is that the Parliament was the one among these mediaeval creations which ultimately consented to betray and to destroy the rest”.

This popular parliamentarism  existed in Russia too, but we never had this sad result, chiefly because these Councils were never summoned again after Peter I, that is the beginning of the 18-th century. And it must be said that all their time The Land Councils lived up to the highest expectations. The parliament of the 20-th century – the Duma – is not of local origin. And it must be jotted down as well, that the Duma of the beginning of the 20-th century played a negative role in the revolutions and riots of 1917. So we could suppose that parliaments at least bear a grain of instability: and it should be kept in mind.  And again speaks Chesterton.

“We have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there was a real revolution of the poor.  It very nearly succeeded; and I need not conceal the conviction that it would have been the best possible thing for all of us if it had entirely succeeded. If Richard II had really sprung into the saddle of Wat Tyler, or rather if his parliament had not unhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed the fact of the new peasant freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was already common to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the form of a royal charter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as is possible to human nature”.

“I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really came with the fall of Richard II, following on his failure to use mediaeval despotism in the interests of mediaeval democracy.  England, like the other nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the death of the ancient civilization as by its escape from death, or by its refusal to die. Mediaeval civilization had arisen out of the resistance to the barbarians, to the naked barbarism from the North and the more subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liberties and local government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and taxation; and in the peasant war of the fourteenth century in England, the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance. They both found that a third thing was already too strong for them That third thing was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself the Parliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, had primarily consisted of plain men summoned by the King like jury men; but it soon became a very special jury. It became, for good or evil, a great organ of government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob; it did many great and not a few good things”.

“I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the mediaevals did after the other barbarian defeat:  beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family”.

Well, we’ve analyzed quite a lot of information. Both Russia and England have to fight a lot of problems. The modern world has come to the point, where it can be saved, probably, only by a miracle, for Christianity is as weak as never and globalism is moving too fast – this is radically against the idea of guilds and parish life. But let the ideas of Chesterton help those of us, who still have common sense in today’s uncommon nonsense, to at least realize our ways and our tasks. And let us do what we have to do – and whatever happens – let it happen (Leo Tolstoy).