Emma Goldman Speaks on 'Tolstoy'

On December 13, 1916, prominent radical anarchist Emma Goldman spoke at Rochester's Century Club. Goldman chose as her subject a literary appreciation of the works of the Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

The Century Club was a service club for upper-class women; since 1910, it had met in a lavish mansion built for a prominent industrialist in 1896.

It is likely that the Club would only have opened its halls to the controversial "Red Emma" if she restricted herself to a “tame” literary topic. Even so, Tolstoy's commitments as an anarchist and pacifist closely echoed Goldman's own, enabling her to weave substantial subversive content into a lecture innocuously addressed to high-society women.

Still, it is likely that in her discussion of Tolstoy here, she emphasized Tolstoy's anarchism less fervently than she did when she delivered the address "Tolstoy, Artist and Anarchist" in the far more radical venue of Germania Hall some five years earlier, on January 6, 1911.