Chapter XI: Part IX: From a Letter to Peter Verigin, the Doukhobor Leader

The thoughts expressed in your letter about the advantage of living intercourse over intercourse by means of dead books pleased me greatly and I share them. I write books, and therefore know all the evil they produce. I know how people who do not wish to receive the truth can avoid reading books, or understanding what goes against the grain and exposes them, and I know how they can misinterpret and pervert--as they have done with the Gospels. All this I know, but yet I consider books to be, in our time, inevitable. I say “in our time” in contradistinction to the Gospel times, when there were no printing-presses and books were not used and the means of communication were vocal. Then it was possible to do without books, for the enemies of truth had none. But now one cannot leave this powerful engine entirely for the enemies of truth to use for deception, but must also see that it is used on the side of truth.

To refuse to make use of a book or a letter to convey one’s thoughts, or to get at the thoughts of others, would be like refusing to use one’s strength of voice to convey to many people at once what one has to say, or the use of one’s ears to understand what some one is saying in a loud voice. It would be like refusing to acknowledge the possibility of conveying thought except tête-à-tête or in a whisper. Writing and printing have but multiplied a thousand, a hundred thousand, times the number of people by whom the thoughts expressed may be heard; but the relation between him who expresses and him who receives the thoughts remains as before. As in conversation the hearer may grasp and understand what is said or may let it go in at one ear and out at the other, so it is with printed matter. As the reader of a book may twist it this way or that, so also may he who hears spoken words. As in books (and we constantly see this) much may be written that is superfluous and empty, so it is with speech. A difference exists, but it is a difference that is sometimes to the advantage of vocal sometimes of printed communication. The advantage of vocal communication is that the hearer feels the spirit of the speaker, but the disadvantage is that very often empty talkers (for instance lawyers), having a gift of words, sway men not by their reasonableness but by their mastery of oratorical art, which is not so with books. Another advantage of verbal communication is that a hearer who has not understood a matter can ask questions, but there is the accompanying disadvantage that those who have failed to understand (often purposely failed) can put questions which are not to the point and thus divert the stream of thought--which is not so with books.

The disadvantages of books are: first, that paper can endure all things, and people can have any nonsense printed causing enormous labour to be wasted in paper-making and type-setting, which is not so with vocal communication, for people can refuse to listen to nonsense. Secondly, that books are multiplying enormously, so that the good ones get lost in the sea of empty and harmful ones. But then again the advantages of the press are very great, and consist chiefly in the fact that the circle of hearers is extended a hundredfold or a thousandfold as compared to the hearers of the spoken word. And this increase in the circle of readers is important, not because there are many readers, but because, among the millions of people of different nations and stations to whom a book becomes accessible, those who share similar thoughts discover one another, and while living thousands of miles apart, not knowing one another, are yet united and live by one spirit, having the spiritual joy and encouragement of feeling that they are not alone. Such communication I now have with you and with many, many, men of other nations--men who have never seen me, but who yet are nearer to me than sons or brothers of my own blood.

The chief consideration in favour of books is, that since men reached a certain stage of development in the external conditions of life, books and printing in general have become a means of communication among men and therefore must not be neglected. So many harmful books have been written and circulated that the evil can only be met by other books. One wedge drives out another! Christ said: “What I tell you in the ear proclaim upon the housetops.” Printing is just that proclamation from the housetops. The printed word is a tongue--a tongue that reaches very far; and for this reason all that is said of the tongue relates also to the printed word: “Therewith bless we the Lord; and therewith curse we men, made after the likeness of God.” Therefore one cannot be too careful what one says and listens to, nor what one prints and reads....

The above extract is from a letter written to Verigin while he
was in exile at Obdórsk, near the mouth of the Obi in Northern
Siberia. The whole letter is given in _Essays and Letters_ by
Tolstoy, in the “World’s Classics” series. Oxford University
Press.

1895.