Monthly Shaarli
August, 2016
Fetzer recounts Tolstoy's few encounters with Mormonism. He discounts some of the claims Tolstoy is rumored to have made about the Mormon religion (like "If Mormonism is able to endure, unmodified, until it reaches the third and fourth generation,it is destined to become the greatest power the world has ever known"), and it is easy to see why, but his skepticism that an anti-capitalist like Tolstoy would admire the post-war church seems odd to me... the Mormon cooperative movement had died out by the 1890s, but surely its memory was not completely forgotten?
See also Susan McCloud's article in the Deseret News (21 September 2014), "Leo Tolstoy's view of Mormons as teaching 'The American Religion'":
https://web.archive.org/web/www.deseretnews.com/article/865611356/
I should read this again, more carefully, before I write too much about it.
I want to read this book.
Though it looks like some years after writing it, ts author followed his historical revisionism into holocaust denial:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Martin
A look at the schism that developed between two factions of American anarchism -- the Boston Individualist and Chicago Communists -- in the 19th century (with reverberations to today and beyond).