The Last Station

17 L. N.

LETTER TO GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

YASNAYA POLYANA, 9 MAY 1910

My dear Mr Bernard Shaw,

I have received your play The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and witty letter. I have read it with pleasure. I am in full sympathy with its subject.

Your remark that the preaching of righteousness has generally little influence on people and that young men regard as laudable that which is contrary to righteousness is quite correct. It does not, however, follow that such preaching is unnecessary. The reason of the failure is that those who preach do not fulfill what they preach, that is, hypocrisy.

I also cannot agree with what you call your theology. You enter into controversy with that which no thinking person of our time believes or can believe: with a God-creator. And yet you seem to recognize a God who has got definite aims comprehensible to you. ‘To my mind,’ you write, ‘unless we conceive God engaged in a continual struggle to surpass himself as striving at every birth to make a better man than before, we are conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob.’

Concerning the rest of what you say about God and about evil, I will repeat the words I said, as you write, about your Man and Superman, namely that the problem about God and evil is too important to be spoken of in jest. And therefore I tell you frankly that I received a very painful impression from the concluding words of your letter: ‘Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?’