Doukhobour women, 1887. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Quakers and the Doukhobors: Graham Waterhouse is intrigued
‘I was intrigued to learn of his reason for writing it.’
A few years ago I read Leo Tolstoy’s last great novel, Resurrection, and was intrigued to learn of his reason for writing it, more than twenty years after he wrote Anna Karenina. The translator of my Penguin edition, Rosemary Edmonds, relates in her introduction how Tolstoy had been shocked by the persecution of the Doukhobors, a Russian Christian peasant sect which preached chastity, teetotalism, vegetarianism, sharing of all possessions, and above all, resistance to the use of force against evil. Their name, originally given them by the Orthodox Church, which intended it to be derogatory, has the meaning of ‘spirit-fighters’, but the Doukhobors embraced the name as meaning fighters for the spirit of God, not against it. The parallels with Quaker history were not lost on me.
