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Non-Activity

"Non-Activity" is an 1893 article by Leo Tolstoy[1] and also the term used to describe Tolstoy's form of anarchist and pacifist thought. This thinking of Tolstoy's was influenced by wuwei (無為, "inaction"), a Taoist concept of finding victory by withdrawing from action.[2][3] Sometimes Tolstoy's "non-activity" is translated as "under-activity"[4] and others have called it "non-violent non-cooperation."[5]

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Maxim Gorky has described Tolstoy's "misty preaching of 'non-activity', of 'non-resistance to evil', the doctrine of passivism" as being the result of the natural fermentation of old Russian blood with Mongolian fatalism.[6][7] According to Henri Troyat and Alexander Lukin, Tolstoy found the ideals of ancient, Chinese philosophy to nicely contrast against the over-industrialized and overly-scientific achievements of the Western Capitalist world.[8][9] This admiration was cross-cultural, as Chinese and Japanese anarchists had preferred Tolstoy's pure, agrarian Anarchism over the scientific, modernized anarchism of Peter Kropotkin or Mikhail Bakunin.[10] Tolstoy even translated Laozi into Russian.[11] This translation was made from a German and French text of Tao Te Ching, and this project took Tolstoy a decade.[12] According to Harold D. Roth, it was finally completed in 1893-4.[13]

History

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This work was translated to French as "Le non-agir".[3]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Milivoy S. Stanoyevich (1916). Tolstoy's Theory of Social Reform. University of California, Berkeley. p. 47.
  2. ^ Mims, Edwin; Bassett, John Spencer; Wannamaker, William Hane; Glasson, William Henry; Boyd, William Kenneth; Few, William Preston, eds. (1951). The South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 50. Duke University Press. p. 156.
  3. ^ a b Revue Canadienne-americaine D'etudes Slaves (1972). Canadian-American Slavic Studies. Vol. 6. University of Pittsburgh. p. 333.
  4. ^ Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (2017). Tolstoy's Quest for God. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781351471756.
  5. ^ Ananta Kumar Giri, ed. (2021). Roots, Routes and a New Awakening: Beyond One and Many and Alternative Planetary Futures. Springer Singapore. p. 141. ISBN 9789811571220.
  6. ^ Maxim Gorky (1920). Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Vol. 1. Freeman. p. 512.
  7. ^ Maxim Gorky (1920). Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. B. W. Huebsch. p. 39.
  8. ^ Alexander Lukin (2016). The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia's Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations Since the Eighteenth Century. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781315290515.
  9. ^ Henri Troyat (2001). Tolstoy. Grove Press. p. 440. ISBN 9780802137685.
  10. ^ Germaine A. Hoston (2021). The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan. Princeton University Press. p. 158. ISBN 9780691225418.
  11. ^ 老子, 韦利, Arthur Waley, 陈鼓应, 傅惠生 (1999). Huisheng Fu, 傅惠生 (ed.). Laozi. Translated by Arthur Waley, Guying Chen, 陈鼓应, 韦利. 湖南人民出版社. ISBN 9787543820890.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  12. ^ Sho Konishi (2020). Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan. Brill. p. 112. ISBN 9781684175314.
  13. ^ Harold David Roth, Angus Charles Graham (2003). A Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. University of Hawaii Press. p. 135. ISBN 9780824826437.
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