It Comes Dearly

Appearing first in a Moscow journal at a time when Tolstoy’s own ethical and religious doubts permeated Russian literary life, the novella pivots on the plight of a peasant conscript, driven by a quiet intransigence against state authority. Unlike Tolstoy’s grander narratives, this tale is almost ascetic in form, stripping away ornament and ambiguity to expose the stark conflict between the demands of social conformity and the law of individual conscience. The narrative’s refusal to romanticize suffering or to promise redemption reinforces the realism of its world, where the cost of resisting the machinery of state repression cannot be paid in mere platitudes, but exacts a toll in isolation, hardship, and misunderstood sacrifice.

Philosophically, the work occupies an uneasy position between the radical Christianity of Tolstoy’s later essays and the severe realism of his mature fiction, confronting the reader with a world in which good deeds are not vindicated by worldly reward. Its literary merit lies in the way it reframes the heroism of refusal—not as spectacle or martyrdom, but as an ordinary, almost invisible endurance. In its economy of style and its unsparing moral clarity, It Comes Dearly stands as a challenging meditation on the true price of fidelity to conscience, a theme as unsettling for late imperial Russia as for any era unwilling to reconcile principle and power.

This critical reader's edition presents a modern translation of the original manuscript, crafted for the modern reader with clean, contemporary language and simplified sentence structures that clarify his complex Russian phrasing and specific antiquated references. Supplementary material enriches the text with autobiographical, historical, and linguistic context, including an afterword by the translator on Tolstoy’s personal history, impact, and intellectual legacy, an index of the philosophical concepts he employs—emphasizing Existentialism and influence by Schopenhauer—a comprehensive chronological list of his published writings, and a detailed timeline of his life, highlighting the personal relationships that shaped his philosophy.