I n their discontent at the conditions in Russia—a discontent that emerged particularly among intellectuals, after the assassination of 1881 put an end to the efforts for political and social reforms—and at the same time in their vague hope for a new order arising from a moral rebirth of humankind rather than from revolution, the Russian Esperantists bore a distinct resemblance to the disciples of Leo Tolstoy—that is, to people who advocated non-violent resistance to wrongdoing by creative indi- viduals equipped with a sense of religious responsibility but rejecting the external forms of religion. If radicals reproached Tolstoy for undermining young people's faith in revolution, they must surely have regarded most Esperantists as hopelessly naive in their belief that through a common language all people would become brothers and that all social evils would simply disappear. According to Vladimir Gernet,[45] there were even peo- ple who learned Esperanto because they considered it a gift that God had given to Christians so that, with its aid, they could spread Christianity among the multilingual pagans.[46]
Tolstoy himself, quite early on, in 1889, expressed his support for Zamenhof's work, later repeating these affirmations of support on vari- ous occasions and allowing the translation of his works into Esperanto without royalties. In 1894, two periodicals in Odessa published an exten- sive letter from Tolstoy, which concluded as follows:
I have many times seen that people maintained hostility towards one another simply because of mechanical obstacles to reciprocal understand- ing. Thus the learning of Esperanto and its propagation are undoubtedly a Christian endeavor, which will help in the creation of the Kingdom of God—that endeavor that is the principal and singular goal of human life.[47]
Perhaps because of this letter the relations between the Tolstoyans and the Esperantists grew close. On 15 January 1895, the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs communicated to the Chief Administration for Press Affairs that it had acquired information to the effect that some disciples of Tolstoy planned to transform the journal Esperantisto into an organ for the dissemination of the ideas of their master.3 [48] Indeed, in February the staff of the publisher Posrednik (The Intermediary), which, under the vigilant eyes of the censor, was trying to popularize Tolstoy's thought, had launched a column in Esperantisto. The column was dedicated 'primarily to the idea of peaceful spiritual development and the union of all people and of every living thing in a single worldwide fraternity based on the principles of Moderation and Love, which reject violence and superstition'.[49]
Posrednik began its cooperation with Esperantisto with a contribution by Tolstoy himself, 'Reason and Religion',[50] which contained unorthodox and anti-authoritarian ideas, even if presented in a quiet and unprovoca- tive manner:
But the will of God is known, not by some extraordinary miracle, the writ- ing of the law by the finger of the Deity on stone tablets, with the compila- tion by the aid of the Holy Ghost of an infallible book, or by the infallibility of any holy man or collection of men, but only by the use of reason by all men, transmitting both by deed and by word, one to another, the con- sciousness of truth that ever more and more elucidating itself to them.[51]
The same issue carried the news that an organization had been founded in Amsterdam 'whose members refuse to pay levies by the state';[52] and for the March issue Posrednik contributed a long article on the Sino- Japanese War, which, alluding to Buddhist religious leaders in Japan who 'are turning to the armed forces to encourage them to butchery', pointed out that governments need wars 'to distract and seduce the people'.[53]
But the cooperation with the Tolstoyans, barely begun, hit the Esperantists hard. In April 1895, the publication of Tolstoy's 'Reason and Religion' caused the censor to prohibit the further entry of the journal Esperantisto into Russia. As a result, the journal, suddenly losing three- quarters of its almost 600 subscribers, was forced to cease publication in August of the same year.2 7 Feeling that he shared responsibility for this mishap, Tolstoy at once intervened with the authorities and in fact succeeded in having the ban on importing the periodical canceled. But the action came too late to prevent the journal's demise.[54]
This incident was no routine matter. After the censorship administra- tion, tipped off by the political police, moved against Esperantisto, the police then sent instructions to the local gendarmes to investigate those persons secretly reading and circulating the forbidden issue.[55] Clearly, this object of state surveillance was no longer seen as some harmless curiosity, the hobby of impractical idealists who hardly merited the attentions of the censor, but as a movement which, while still small in numbers, seemed to have allied itself with advocates for social reform through religion.
From now on, the Esperantists were engaged in an uphill battle to prove their sociopolitical loyalty to the authorities and counter suspicions that the language served conspiratorial goals. Often, such self-defense was to no avaiclass="underline" the censor refused permission to publish an Esperanto journal even when the petitioners promised to publish a parallel text in Russian. Between June 1899 and October 1904, only on rare occasions were Esperanto publications printed in Russia or allowed entry from abroad; during these years the Tsarist government intensified its persecution of revolutionary movements, or movements it deemed revolutionary. Not until 1904, for example, were the Lithuanians allowed to publish books or other printed matter in their mother tongue, and they could encoun- ter Esperanto only by way of a textbook printed in Tilsit (Germany) in 1890 and smuggled into Lithuania.[56]
Westward Advance
While the Russians continued to work in extremely difficult conditions, in other countries the Esperantists had already laid the foundations for a movement whose strength was such that the maneuvers of the authori- ties in a single country, even one as big as Russia, could not decisively threaten its existence.
This foundation was laid in the politically and economically more developed countries of western Europe—by people who did not feel themselves observed at every step by an autocratic regime, and whose lives passed more tranquilly, without the prospect of bloody conflicts within their own country. In the mid-1890s a new period began in the history of Esperanto, the so-called French or promotional period. Its most notable representative was the somewhat mysterious Louis de Beaufront,[57] who founded the Society for the Dissemination of Esperanto (Societe pour la propagation de l'Esperanto) and, as of 1901, published, by way of the publishing house Hachette, the first textbooks easily accessible to the larger public. De Beaufront became the first conscious propagandist for the language: he introduced modern methods of systematic advertising and little by little succeeded in attracting to the movement people who saw in Esperanto a practical tool for international relations in a capital- ist era. They were not wrong to name him 'the ancestor of all French Esperantists and new Esperantists generally'.[58]
Thanks to the activities of De Beaufront, by the beginning of the twen- tieth century the practical applicability of Esperanto had so advanced that the young movement could soon calculate among its ranks several influ- ential figures in French scientific life. Among them were the mathemati- cian Carlo Bourlet (who won the support of the publisher Hachette and the influential Touring Club de France), the philosopher Emile Boirac, the linguist Theophile Cart, the military general and ballistics specialist Hippolyte Sebert and the aviation pioneer Ernest Archdeacon. These new recruits were attracted to Esperanto not to escape a suffocating intellectual atmosphere or to contribute to the calming of national conflicts: such rhetoric of fraternity, adopted by Russian Esperantists against the back- ground of interethnic hatred under the Tsar, was entirely foreign to them. The highly idealistic, almost sectarian characteristics of the early move- ment had now lost their dominance.