Proust rejected (respectfully) Tolstoi’s polemic against patriotism in the following short review, which was translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner and included in Marcel Proust on Art and Literature (1957).
To what intellectual guidance dare we commit ourselves? At the present day, the mind with the greatest aptitude for truth, the will with the strongest bent toward good, is probably Tolstoi’s. In a world of lies and wickedness, he reacts as sharply as Socrates could have done. And now, in Patriotism and the Christian Spirit, the book he has written as a counterblast to the Franco-Russian celebrations, he sets himself to do away with the idea of love of country. Patriotism is absurd, he says, and self-contradictory, since to a German it means, “Germany is the finest country,” to an Italian, “Italy is the finest country,” etc. Then must we also dismiss the love of family, since it reposes on every son’s preference for his father and mother? “Besides,” adds Tolstoi, “patriotism, which governments artificially work up, leaves the masses unmoved, while socialism, which governments repress, daily appeals to them more strongly. A Russian peasant will choose to go and live in no matter what country, if wages are higher etc.” If this unhappily were true, it would only prove that concern for self tends to predominate over concern for others. How can Tolstoi find this a matter for rejoicing, how can he willingly attempt to dry up a fountainhead of disinterested feeling–and today, at least patriotism is that–without being sure of causing another such to spring from the rock when he smites it. If socialism involves a predominance of altruistic over eogistic instincts of those in the moneyed classes who adhere to it of their own free will, among the poor on the other hand it marks a predominance of egoistic instincts over altruistic, but patriotism, in both the one and the other, subordinate egoistic instincts to altruisitic.
In short, what angers Tolstoi most in warfare is that combatants to the death feel no hatred for each other. Is it not exactly because of this that war retains a certain moral character? It is not to glut a base appetite that a whole nation takes up arms, it is “for duty’s sake.” Besides, when war is over, there is often no hatred between officers on either side.
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in the world of matter and material forces one can destroy in order to create, make use of evil, avail oneself of opposites, subordinate the means to the end. It is not so in the world of Justice and Love. Anarchists who assume that after conquering the world by injustice they will establish the rule of Justice in it, who propose to enthrone charity on violence, misunderstand what the words justice and charity mean, and the nature of those virtues. Force may bring about an equal distribution of private fortunes, never will Justice have been further from ruling the world. By practicing violence, slander and ostracism, anti-semites may forcibly convert the whole world to Catholicism; on that day the whole world will be dechristianized, since Christianity means the indwelling God, a truth sought by the heart and assented to by the conscience. Let us never subordinate to a duty which is abstruse, remote and uncertain, an explicit and immediate duty to deal justly and to love country.