What to Do? Thoughts Evoked By the Census of Moscow — Reading Companion

The Census as Moral Mirror

Tolstoy does not treat the census as a neutral statistical tool. Instead, he presents it as a device that reveals the hidden structure of Moscow's social life. The act of going door to door, recording names and conditions, forces the enumerator—and the reader—to see the city's poverty at close range. Tolstoy emphasizes that the poor are not devoid of understanding; they 'judge precisely as we do.' The census, in his hands, becomes a mirror held up to the conscience of the privileged. He notes that the poor see luxury 'flung madly away before their eyes' and cannot accept that such inequality is just. The essay's structure thus alternates between the enumerator's perspective and the poor's judgment, creating a dialectical movement that questions the very basis of social order.

Recurring Images of Clothing and Watches

Throughout the excerpts, clothing and timepieces appear as charged symbols of aspiration and ruin. A peasant boy dismissed from service acquires a 'vest and a watch-chain, and dandified boots.' Another young man, in debt for shoes, considers a watch indispensable to avoid ridicule. An old grandfather, who has eaten no butter all Lent, cannot fathom his grandson's desire for a watch. These objects—coats, shoes, watches—recur as markers of a desperate mimicry of the wealthy. Tolstoy uses them to illustrate how the poor internalize the values of the rich, spending beyond their means to appear respectable. The image of the watch, in particular, ties to the biblical epigraph: 'where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.' The essay's movement between these concrete details and the Gospel text creates a persistent tension between material need and spiritual aspiration.

The Household as Microcosm

Tolstoy repeatedly draws on examples from his own household and village to illustrate the dynamics of poverty and aspiration. He recounts the fates of servants—a cook who takes to drink, a footman who relapses, a chambermaid dismissed after a liaison. These vignettes are not mere illustrations; they are evidence of a systemic pattern. The young man who borrows money for shoes, the boy who wants a watch—these are not isolated cases but symptoms of a social disease. Tolstoy's method is to move from the particular to the general, using the household as a laboratory for observing how the desire for status corrupts. The structure of the essay mirrors this: each anecdote is a small narrative that opens onto a larger argument about the impossibility of serving both God and mammon. The reader is left to see that the problem is not individual weakness but a structure that makes such choices inevitable.

Biblical Framing and the Question of Action

The essay is bookended by scripture: the epigraph from Luke and Matthew, and the repeated question 'What shall we do then?' Tolstoy does not offer a programmatic answer. Instead, he uses the biblical text to frame the census as a moral crisis. The command to 'lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth' stands in direct opposition to the behavior he observes. The essay's movement is circular: it begins with the question, proceeds through observation and anecdote, and returns to the question, now sharpened by the evidence. Tolstoy's refusal to provide a simple solution is itself a structural choice. He forces the reader to sit with the discomfort of the question, to feel the weight of the discrepancy between Christian teaching and social practice. The closing of the essay, though not fully excerpted, likely returns to this unresolved tension, leaving the reader with the task of answering the question for themselves.

Tolstoy's essay resists easy categorization: it is part social report, part moral treatise, part personal confession. Readers should attend to the way he weaves together statistical observation, biblical quotation, and domestic anecdote. The movement between these registers is not arbitrary; it is the method by which Tolstoy forces the abstract question of poverty into the realm of personal responsibility. The census, for him, is not a document to be filed but a summons to action. Whether the reader agrees with his conclusions or not, the essay demands that the question 'What to do?' be taken seriously, not as a rhetorical flourish but as a lived problem.

Remembering that cold census walk, how numbers became faces on doorsteps—it reminded me of reading The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope — Volume 1 — Themes and Context, where letters turned distant estates into intimate voices. Both books made me feel the same quiet ache: that behind every tally or envelope, someone’s whole life is breathing, waiting to be noticed.