====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Russian writers on war
====
Nikolai Leskov
From The Cathedral Folk (1872)
Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood
Owing to the illness of the teacher Gonorsky, Prepotensky was temporarily entrusted with the history lessons, and he immediately began to hold forth on the immorality of war, and applied this directly to the happenings in Poland. But as though this were not enough for him, he also ridiculed civilization, censured patriotism, and the principle of nationality, furthermore he made fun of decency to the children, representing it even as, in many respects, immoral; and he cited as an example of this, that cultivated peoples conceal the begetting of a man, but do not conceal the act of murder, and even carry the weapons of war on their shoulders…
Source