Maxim Gorky has described Tolstoy's "misty preaching of 'non-activity', of 'non-resistance to evil', the doctrine of passivism" as being the result of the natural fermentation of old Russian blood with Mongolian fatalism. According to
Henri Troyat and Alexander Lukin, Tolstoy found the ideals of ancient, Chinese philosophy to nicely contrast against the over-industrialized and overly-scientific achievements of the Western Capitalist world. This admiration was cross-cultural, as Chinese and Japanese anarchists had preferred Tolstoy's pure, agrarian Anarchism over the scientific, modernized anarchism of
Peter Kropotkin or
Mikhail Bakunin. Tolstoy even translated
Laozi into Russian. This translation was made from a German and French text of
Tao Te Ching, and this project took Tolstoy a decade. According to
Harold D. Roth, it was finally completed in 1893–4. ==History==