What to Do?

In What to Do? Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow, Leo Tolstoy turns a city's census into a moral reckoning. What begins as an encounter with Moscow's beggars, police, cabmen, and hidden poor becomes a fierce indictment of a society that measures progress while tolerating misery, censorship, and inequality. Tolstoy frames the work with biblical warnings against wealth, greed, and divided loyalties, asking how anyone can live honestly in a world built on labor stolen from others. Against money, interest, status, and "coupons," he argues that a person's true property is body, conscience, and the power to work. Honest labor, he insists, is the natural path to freedom, simplicity, and happiness, while idle privilege and wealth without labor create modern slavery, vanity, and dehumanization. The essay broadens into a call for reform through individual example, urging readers to reject inherited delusions and live by moral truth. In its urgent appeal to women, mothers, and all responsible people, it becomes a challenge to transform both home and society. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.