What Shall We Do?
What Shall We Do?
In the winter of 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy walked through the slums of Moscow and encountered something that would shatter his comfortable certainties. What he saw there - the grinding, dehumanizing poverty alongside obscene wealth - set off years of moral reckoning. His initial impulse was simple: give money, alleviate suffering. But Tolstoy discovered that charity was a Band-Aid on a wound that required surgery. This bracing non-fiction work recounts his investigation into why poverty persists, why wealth accumulates, and how both destroy the human spirit. Tolstoy argues that the luxury of the ruling class and the misery of the poor are not separate problems but the same problem - two sides of a single coin. He examines how state power and market forces conspire to maintain inequality, and he proposes radical reforms grounded not in political ideology but in a fierce, personal interpretation of Christian teaching. This is Tolstoy at his most uncompromising: a nobleman denouncing his own class, an artist turning his gaze from novels to the brutal economics of his time.
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