What Shall We Do?

LibriVox recording of What Shall We Do? by Leo Tolstoy. (Translated by Vladimir Chertkov.) Read in English by Joanna Michal Hoyt. A vivid description of wealth and poverty in Russia in Tolstoy's day, an inquiry into the root causes of economic inequality, and a vision of a more just way of living. Tolstoy recounts his own disturbing encounters with extreme poverty in Moscow, his initial idea of making the problem disappear by generous financial contributions, and his subsequent realization that the problem of poverty was much more intractable than he had imagined. He concludes that poverty is