THE CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS KINDNESS: TOLSTOY’S COMMUNAL KITCHENS AND MUTUAL AID

Between November 1891 and June 1893, as famine spread to seventeen provinces in European Russia, Tolstoy headed a famine aid project that ensured the survival of thousands of people: a network of communal kitchens. His writing from the time reveals that his approach to famine relief was informed by...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Slavic and East European journal 2021-12, Vol.65 (4), p.721-740
Main Author: Aizman, Ania
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate change
Famine
Ideology
Russian history
Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910)
Writers
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Summary:Between November 1891 and June 1893, as famine spread to seventeen provinces in European Russia, Tolstoy headed a famine aid project that ensured the survival of thousands of people: a network of communal kitchens. His writing from the time reveals that his approach to famine relief was informed by scientific debate between Russian and British thinkers about “the struggle for existence” and the dichotomy of competition versus cooperation — a debate in which, not coincidentally, Russian naturalists agreed with anarchists on the primacy of “the law of mutual aid.” Mutual aid is cited and coded in Tolstoy’s writing and, ultimately, I argue, informed not only his theory of social change but also the role and mechanisms by which art enables social change. In his essays about the famine, Tolstoy developed a theory of change through a form of famine aid that “infects” those it involves, so that vulnerability, risk, and moral benefits are more evenly distributed across the community, ensuring its survival and moral flourishing. This theory of “infectious” transformation reappears in What Is Art?, making possible the analysis of similarities between mutual aid and aesthetic experience — both operate via horizontal transmission of inspiration that Tolstoy describes as “infectious.” Tolstoy’s discussion of the communal kitchen is revisited in this paper in light of new scholarship exploring infectiousness, the ongoing Coronavirus epidemic, and increasing public attention to mutual aid. Contemporary mutual aid groups share common roots with Tolstoy’s famine aid, hearkening back to early modern mutual and friendly societies and Quaker relief systems, to the settlement house movement, and later the Catholic Worker Movement.
ISSN:0037-6752
2325-7687