6. What then must we do?

Abstract

In his later years, Tolstoy occupied himself with questions of social justice. Tolstoy wrote on a number of topics, including poverty, the allocation of goods and privileges, class relations, landownership, manual labour, famine, charity, civil disobedience, non-violence, and the ethics of diet. Tolstoy had been concerned with these questions earlier, both in his fiction and in his own life. But, inspired by his newly articulated faith, he felt the need to address these social issues more directly. For Tolstoy, faith and action went hand in hand. ‘What then must we do?’ considers how Tolstoy addressed these issues in What Then Must We Do?, Resurrection, and other works.