Summary

Leo Tolstoy, Frenchized name of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й Listen), born on August 28, 1828 (September 9, 1828 in the Gregorian calendar) in Iasnaya Poliana, and died on November 7, 1910 (November 20, 1910 in the Gregorian calendar) in Astapovo, was a Russian writer. He is famous for his novels and short stories depicting the life of the Russian people in Tsarist times, as well as for his essays, in which he condemns the civil and ecclesiastical powers. He was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church; after his death, his manuscripts were destroyed by Tsarist censors. His works were intended to highlight the major issues facing civilization. His works also include short stories and plays.

War and Peace, which took him five years to write, is considered his major work. In this historical realist novel, published in 1869, he depicts all social classes at the time of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. It's a vast fresco of the complexities of social life and human psychology. The result is a profound and original reflection on history and violence in human life.

Tolstoy was a writer whose talent was quickly recognized thanks to his autobiographical accounts of his childhood and youth, then of his life as a soldier in Sevastopol (Crimea). He became very famous, as he had hoped, with the novel Anna Karenina in 1877. But he was unhappy, anguished and nihilistic. After an intense search for answers to his existential and philosophical questions, he became enthusiastic about the doctrine of Christ. From then on, and until the end of his life, he expressed his ideal of truth, goodness, justice and peace in essays, and sometimes in fiction.

A Christian anarchist, he advocated manual labor, living in contact with nature, rejecting materialism, self-denial and detachment from family and social commitments. He hoped that the simple communication of truth from one person to another would do away with all the superstitions, cruelties and contradictions of life.

Because he was praised for his novels, his thought became a point of crystallization in Russia and Europe. He is admired or hated for his criticism of national churches and militarism. Towards the end of his life, he briefly corresponded with Gandhi, the Indian politician and religious leader, who drew inspiration from his "non-resistance to evil through violence" to develop his doctrine of "non-violence". Towards the end of the 19th century, a number of ideological currents (libertarian, anti-capitalist, etc.) took up Tolstoi's legacy. They took up his criticism of the churches, patriotism and economic injustice. Although his religious thought has always remained on the bangs, his literary genius is universally recognized.

Children & Youth

Born in Iasnaya Poliana on August 28, 1828 (September 9, 1828 in the Gregorian calendar), Leo Tolstoy was the son of Count Nicholas Ilyich Tolstoy, a penniless veteran of the Russian campaign, and Countess Maria Nikolayevna Volkonskaya, daughter of Field Marshal Nicholas Volkonsky. The Countess was thirty-two years old at the time of her marriage, which was late for the time. The couple had four sons, Serge, Nicolas, Dimitri and Léon, and a daughter, Marie. Shortly after Marie's birth, in August 1830, when Léon was just eighteen months old, the countess died of puerperal fever.

His family belonged to the great Russian aristocracy, counting many important figures, both in politics and literature, in modern Russia and long before, claiming among its forebears, for example, Mamai Khan (1335-1380), the powerful Mongol commander who led the Golden Horde for several years on devastating expeditions affecting present-day Russia and Ukraine.

Until the age of eight and a half, Leon knew only the countryside of Iasnaya Poliana, the family and the small farmers. He learned arithmetic, as well as some French, German and Russian. Then the city attracted the siblings, where they received a quality education. During this period, Leon was nicknamed "Liova riova", meaning Leon the whiner, due to his great sensitivity, especially when he left Iasnaya Poliana with his family for Moscow. However, before they could even get used to their new life, the family had to face a new misfortune: on June 21, 1837, their father died suddenly in the middle of the street. The following year, their grandmother suffered the same fate. Following the death of Alexandra Ilinitchna Osten-Sacken, an aunt who had been appointed guardian, her sister Pelagie Ilinitchna Yushkov replaced her in this role. The Tolstoy family moved to Kazan, on the banks of the Volga.

In 1844, sixteen-year-old Leon enrolled in the Faculty of Oriental Languages at Kazan University, thinking of becoming a diplomat. He lived with his brothers in the Kisseliov house on what is now Tolstoy Street. He soon became bored with his studies, and after postponing his exams, he turned to the Faculty of Law, where he had little success. He soon realized that the teaching he received did not interest him, and that only his personal reading, which was wide-ranging and varied (history, philosophical treatises), aroused his unfulfilled ambition.

He soon kept a personal diary, as well as a collection of rules of conduct which he fed daily, and referred to just as frequently. His feelings and frustrations carried him away in his desire for perfection rather than righteousness. Even his beauty came to grieve him, as he lamented his unattractive physique. On this subject, he wrote:

"I'm ugly, gauche, messy and without worldly polish. I am irritable, unpleasant to others, pretentious, intolerant and shy as a child. I am ignorant. What I do know, I've learned here and there, with no follow-up and still so little! But there's one thing I love more than good: glory. I'm so ambitious that if I had to choose between glory and virtue, I think I'd choose the former."

- Diary, July 7, 1854

This ambition was not immediately expressed, and when he left university in 1847, at the age of nineteen, he thought he'd find his raison d'être in fieldwork and charity: a boyar landowner, he recounts that he sometimes whipped his serfs, which he regretted. However, he soon turned his back on them, preferring a rambling life from Tula to Moscow, punctuated by gambling (especially cards) and alcohol.

The soldier writer (1851-1855)

His ties with his older brother Nicolas, who had joined the army, led him to fight in the Caucasus, against the mountain people led by the rebel chief Chamil. There he experienced the adventure and glory so many young men of his age were hoping for. He later recounted his experience in Les Cosaques. But for the time being, he was more preoccupied with his childhood memories. He wrote an account of them, Enfance, which he sent to Nikolai Nekrassov, editor of Le Contemporain, who responded favorably on August 29, 1852. The novel was a great success. He soon began work on the sequel: Adolescence, published in 1854, followed by Youth in 1855.

Success could have convinced him that his destiny was that of a writer. However, this idea seemed all the more absurd as his attraction for action prevented him from thinking of himself as a mere man of the pen. With Russia having just declared war on Turkey, Léon left his Cossack friends and joined his regiment in Bessarabia. He is sent to the Crimea, where he experiences the danger that both exhilarates and scandalizes him. Death revolts the man in a hurry. His impatience was relieved by the fall of Sebastopol, which definitively disgusted him with the military profession. He composed three accounts, Sebastopol in December 1854, Sebastopol in May 1855, Sebastopol in August 1855, which moved the Empress, and were translated into French at the request of Alexander II.

In November 1855, Leo Tolstoy was sent as a courier to St. Petersburg. Ivan Tourguéniev received him and put him up, and thanks to him, Leo Tolstoy was able to frequent the circles of the leading writers of the day. But he soon turned away, his temper making him irritable at every exchange. He returned to Iasnaïa Poliana to live more peacefully, while expressing the wish to found a home, which he saw as necessary to his physical and moral equilibrium. The death of his brother Dimitri from tuberculosis convinced him of this.

Wandering (1856-1861)

His profound desire for solitude, his horror of unbridled sexuality and, despite everything, his firm determination to found a home, made Tolstoy a man of complex love feelings, mixing impossible love and lightning love. Impossible love at first, since the man did not easily manage to find that much-vaunted stability; lightning love when he was married to Sophie Behrs.

In Paris, where he arrived in February 1857, he met Ivan Tourguéniev, who introduced him to French arts and culture, which both amused and annoyed him. He decided to leave for Switzerland, where he met his second-degree aunt, Alexandrine Tolstoï, whose intelligence he admired, before returning to Russia and setting off again, on June 25, 1860, for Germany, where he carried out school inspection work and studied teaching methods. His brother Nicolas, suffering from tuberculosis, died on September 20 of the same year. Despite this, Leo Tolstoy continued his peregrinations, touring Europe from Marseille to Rome, Paris to London, where he visited Alexander Herzen, and Brussels, where he met Proudhon.

In March 1857, he stayed with his friend Tourguéniev at the Hôtel de la Cloche in Dijon.

The abolition of serfdom, ordered by Alexander II on February 19, 1861, enchanted Tolstoy - but also made him fear that the event would lead to popular revolt. He became an arbitrator of peace, settling disputes between landowners and serfs in the Krapivna district. Leo's sentimental idleness was cut short by his meeting Sophie Behrs, daughter of Andrei Estafyevich Behrs, a doctor attached to the administration of the Moscow imperial palace of distant German descent. Tolstoy wrote of this event:

"I, a toothless old fool, have fallen in love."

- to her aunt, September 7, 1862

The husband, the father

His marriage to Sophie Behrs, sixteen years his junior, was all the more improbable given Léon's attachment to solitude, his strong personality and his tumultuous past. Like the Pozdnychev of his Kreutzer Sonata, Léon had Sophie read his Diary before their wedding, in which he detailed his worst faults. This did not discourage the young woman, and on September 23, 1862, the couple were married in the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin.

Settled in Iasnaïa Poliana, the couple's relationship was highly ambivalent, with a succession of happy days - a quietude Leon assures us he had never experienced before - followed by heartbreak. This initial calm, though it often caused Sophie, a city girl at heart, to suffer, enabled Tolstoy to achieve the writer's serenity. He published The Cossacks (1863), then began writing War and Peace, originally entitled The Year 1805. After visiting the Borodino battlefield and documenting his experiences in Moscow, he returned to Iasnaïa Poliana to continue writing, with astonishing rigor. Reworking entire passages of War and Peace several times, he managed to complete the sixth and final volume of the work in 1869.

The same year saw the birth of his third son, named Léon after him. This period of enjoyment soon contrasted with the turmoil the writer experienced following a sudden and powerful realization that he was only mortal. This moral upheaval occurred while Tolstoy was traveling to Penza, during a stopover at an inn in the town of Arzamas. On this subject, Leo confided in his Diary:

"Suddenly, my life stopped... I had no more desires. I knew there was nothing to desire. The truth is that life is absurd. I had reached the abyss and saw that before me lay nothing but death. I, a healthy and happy man, felt that I could no longer live.

- Diary, September 1869

It was then that Léon immersed himself in reading philosophers, Schopenhauer in particular, whom he quickly came to appreciate. He made many plans, began writing a syllabary and reopened a school. In reality, this effervescence concealed a profound emptiness caused by the completion of his War and Peace. Tolstoy's talent was soon concentrated on one goal: to write "a novel about contemporary life, the subject of which would be an unfaithful woman". The plan to write Anna Karenina was born after Leo had perused Pushkin's Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin in March 1873, which his son Serge was reading at the time.

The writing of Anna Karenina proceeded slowly, interrupted by a number of family tragedies. In November 1873, the Tolstoys' youngest child, Peter, died at the age of eighteen months, swept away by croup (diphtheria). The following year, Nicolas, the fifth son, barely lived a year, hydrocephalic from birth. Sophie suffered a miscarriage shortly afterwards, and two aunts (Toinette and Pélagie Youchkov) died. This accumulation of tragedies delayed the novel's publication, but did not prevent it, and Léon's stubbornness overcame his skepticism, even his disgust for the work he had just given birth to, which he judged "execrable". Critics, however, took a different view, welcoming the work. Just as he had finished writing his previous novel, he went through a troubled period, in which the philosophical considerations he had interwoven with the novelistic events in Anna Karenina had given birth to an ethico-religious thought.

The search for a simple, spiritual life

His first publications were autobiographical stories (Childhood and Adolescence) (1852-1856). They tell how a child, the son of wealthy landowners, slowly realizes what separates him from his peasant playmates. Later, around 1883, he rejected these books as overly sentimental, as much of his life was revealed in them, and decided to live as a peasant, also discarding his many inherited material possessions (as well as honors, having hereditarily acquired the title of Count). As time goes by, he is increasingly guided by a simple, spiritual existence.

As a young man, following the death of his father, Tolstoy was prey to a feeling of the absurdity of life and, increasingly, of the falseness of social organization. Both sensitive and inclined to rationalize, Tolstoy overcame a great moral crisis through introspection and study, leading a life he liked to keep simple: "I have passed from nihilism to faith", he says in What is my faith? (1880-1883). Thereafter, he strove to convey his ideas on religion, morality and society, with a radical critique of the state and the Church, a denunciation of the idleness of the rich and the misery of the poor, and a radical critique of war and violence. He thus gave a higher meaning to the mobilization he had experienced during the Crimean War (1853-1856) - which he had recounted in Récits de Sébastopol - and to his novel War and Peace, which took place before he was born, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. During the last twenty years of his life, Tolstoy witnessed the rise of socialist movements, the 1905 Revolution, a sort of dress rehearsal for the 1917 Revolution, and the rise of the perils that would lead, a few years after his death, to the Great War and the demise of the Tsarist Empire.

For Tolstoy, true art is not a pursuit of purely aesthetic pleasure, but a means of communicating emotions and uniting people; he therefore criticizes art for art's sake, and bourgeois tastes that patronize inaccessible art out of vanity, and which mean nothing to ordinary people.

Philosophical readings

While finishing War and Peace in the summer of 1869, he discovered Schopenhauer and became enthusiastic about him: "Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men. He even thought of translating it into Russian and publishing it. But the philosopher with whom he had the greatest affinity was the Russian African Spir. In 1896, he read Pensée et Réalité and was deeply impressed, as he wrote in a letter to Hélène Claparède-Spir: "Reading Denken und Wirklichkeit was a great joy for me. I know of no philosopher so profound and at the same time so exact, I mean scientific, accepting only what is indispensable and clear to everyone. I am sure that his doctrine will be understood and appreciated as it deserves, and that the fate of his work will be similar to that of Schopenhauer, who became known and admired only after his death." . On this subject, he wrote in his Diary on May 2, 1896:

"Yet another important event, the work of African Spir. I have just reread what I wrote at the beginning of this journal. Basically it's nothing more than a kind of summary of Spir's entire philosophy, which at that time I not only hadn't read, but didn't even have the faintest idea of."

In 1879, Tolstoy turned to Christianity, which he wrote about in Ma confession et Ma religion (initially censored), but he was highly critical of the Russian Orthodox Church: his Christianity remained marked by rationalism, and religion was always a subject of violent internal debate, leading him to conceive of a Christianity that was detached from materialism and, above all, non-violent. His criticism of oppressive institutions and sources of violence inspired Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Romain Rolland. Their messages were later echoed by Martin Luther King, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and many others. Gandhi read Tolstoy's Letter to a Hindu in 1908, in which the Russian writer denounced acts of violence by Indian nationalists in South Africa; this led Gandhi and Tolstoy to correspond until Tolstoy's death. Similarly, Romain Rolland published his biography Life of Tolstoy shortly after Tolstoy's death. For its part, the Orthodox Church excommunicated Tolstoy after the publication of his novel Resurrection.

Last years

At the end of his life, Tolstoy was regularly plagued by inner dilemmas that tortured him. His relationship with his wife was also extremely difficult, marked in particular by family disputes and Tolstoi's decision to disinherit his children.

On the night of October 28, 1910, after leaving a letter to his wife announcing that he was leaving her, he fled his family in great secrecy with his personal physician, Dr. Dushan Makovitsky, and set off for the Optina Monastery, one of the most famous in Russia. He wants to meet the experienced monks who live there to ease his anxieties, but when he arrives at the monastery gate, he hesitates and turns back before meeting anyone.

On October 31, while passing through Astapovo station, he contracted pneumonia and had to be confined to bed. Agonizing, he refused his wife's visit. Tolstoi's entourage at his bedside prevented Father Varsonofy from entering. Father Varsonofy, a monk from the Optina Monastery, had come especially to try to talk to the writer, after hearing of his deteriorating health.

Tolstoi died on November 7, 1910 (November 20, 1910 in the Gregorian calendar).

The meaning of life

To achieve knowledge of himself and his relationship to the universe, man has only reason, says Tolstoy. However, "neither philosophy nor science," which "study phenomena in pure reason," can lay the foundation for the relationship between man and the universe. In fact, all the spiritual forces of a creature capable of suffering, rejoicing, fearing and hoping are part of this relationship between man and the world; it is therefore through a sense of our personal position in the world that we believe in God. For Tolstoy, faith is thus a "vital necessity" in a man's life; Pascal demonstrated this definitively, he maintained in 1906. Faith is not a question of the will to believe.

Religion defines "our relationship to the world and to its origin, - which we call God"; and morality is the "constant rule, applicable to life, which derives from this relationship". It is therefore "essential to elucidate and clearly express religious truths".

"Humanity follows one of two directions: A) it submits to the laws of conscience, or B) it rejects them and abandons itself to its crude instincts". Assigning personal happiness as the goal of human life makes no sense, because 1° "happiness for some is always acquired at the expense of that of others," 2° "If man acquires earthly happiness, the more he possesses it, the less satisfied he will be, and the more he will desire it," and 3° "The longer man lives, the more he is inevitably affected by old age, disease and finally death, which destroys the possibility of any earthly happiness. However, "life is an aspiration towards a good, a good that cannot be evil, and a life that cannot be death"; "materialists misunderstand what limits life with life itself"; "true life is not material life, but the inner life of our spirit"; "visible life" is a "necessary aid to our spiritual growth" but "only of temporary use". Suicide is irrational, unreasonable, because in death only the form of life changes, and also immoral because the purpose of life is not personal contentment "by fleeing unpleasantness," but to perfect oneself by being useful to the world, and vice versa.

The "meaning of life" is "to do the will of Him who sent us into this world, from whom we came and to whom we shall return. Evil consists in acting against this will, and good in fulfilling it"; the meaning of my life depends on how I explain God's will to myself, with the help of my reason.

Doing God's will brings man the greatest possible happiness, and true freedom. (A conception of freedom found among Catholics and Cathars, for whom true freedom is "not free will, but the power to know evil and to resist it") By replacing our "desires and their gratification" with "the desire to do God's will, in our present state, and in any possible future state, we are no longer "afraid of death"; "And if desires are completely transformed, then only life remains, and there is no death". "This is the only conception that clearly defines man's activity and protects him from despair and suffering.

So what's to be done? "The sole business of human life is to understand the sufferings of individuals, the causes of errors and the activity needed to reduce them. But how? "Live in the clarity of the light that is within me, and place it before men.

True" Christianity

All the introspection and systematic study of theology that led Tolstoy to abandon nihilism can be summed up as follows: religion is "the revelation of God to men and a mode of worship of the divinity," not a "set of superstitions - as believed by the privileged classes who, influenced by science, think that man is ruled by his instincts - nor a "conventional arrangement".

Tolstoy said he only wanted to show true Christianity. As a reformer of Christianity, he said: "No man has to discover anew the law of his life. Those who lived before him have discovered and expressed it, and he has only to verify it with his reason, and accept or reject the propositions expressed in tradition". Reason comes to us from God, unlike tradition, which comes from men and can therefore be false. The "law is hidden only to those who do not wish to follow it" and who, rejecting reason, confidently accept the assertions of those who have also renounced it, and "verify the truth by tradition".

In this, he reasoned exactly like an author he quotes in The Kingdom of God is Within You, Petr Chelčický, who lived at the dawn of John Huss's Reformation: "Men recognize faith with difficulty because it has been soiled by the ignominies committed in its name"; "we must then keep the judgment of the wise elders and use good reasoning"; "we can't say 'I don't know what He thinks' because if we couldn't know, no one would ever believe. There are many who have been disciples of the faith given by Jesus Christ. His will is that we believe His law; faith is necessary for; we cannot be faithful to them without first believing God and His Words - they guide and instruct."

In contemporary times, this same principle of pre-eminence accorded to truth had also been expressed by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison - "Truth for authority, not authority for truth", and whose struggle had largely consisted of denouncing and disproving ecclesiastics and politicians who gave their moral assent, even by their silence, to slavery.

The same approach led Tolstoy and Chelciky to similar understandings of Christianity: "In morals, Chelcicky foreshadowed Tolstoy's teaching to a great extent: he interpreted the Sermon on the Mount literally, denounced war and oaths, opposed the union of Church and State, and said that the duty of all true Christians was to dissociate themselves from the national Church and return to the simple teaching of Jesus and His apostles" Indeed, for Tolstoy, "the essence of Christ's teaching is simply what is comprehensible to everyone in the Gospels".

All the sects Tolstoy cites for admitting to "true" Christianity interpreted the Sermon on the Mount to the letter: Waldensians, Cathars, Mennonites, Moravian Brethren, Shakers, Quakers, Doukhobors and Moloists, and in fact all the principles Tolstoy puts forward, peppering his writings with quotations from the Gospels, derive directly from this attitude. Gospel translators like Martin Luther and John Wycliff played an important role in the life of mankind, since it was enough to "free ourselves from the perversions brought by the Church to the true doctrine of Christ".

The "real" Church

Tolstoy announced his criticism of the Church in My Confession, the preface to his Critique of Dogmatic Theology: "The lie as well as the truth was transmitted by what is called the Church; both were contained in tradition, in what is called holy history and the Scriptures; it was up to me to find the truth and the lie and to separate one from the other". If a coalman's faith includes belief in the Blessed Virgin, that's fine for him, but it's no longer possible, for example, for a cultured lady who knows that "mankind came into being, not from Adam and Eve, but from the development of animal life", because "to truly believe, faith must embrace all the elements of our knowledge".

According to Tolstoy (as well as Chelcicky), Christianity was corrupted by its association with temporal power in the time of Emperor Constantine I. The Church then invented a pseudo-Christianity that allowed ecclesiastics to gain material advantages in return for supporting the representatives of the civil authorities in continuing their former life. The Church then invented a pseudo-Christianity that enabled clergymen to obtain material benefits in return for supporting the representatives of the civil authorities in continuing their old life. Yet the approval by religious authorities of a state based on violence (war, capital punishment, judicial condemnation, retribution, etc.) is a direct negation of Christ's teaching, - moreover, Christian doctrine forbids the status of "master," pecuniary reward for professing Christ's teaching and oaths.

Tolstoy extended the criticism of the Catholic Church that originated at the time of the 15th-century Reformation to all churches, sects and religions, and right up to his own time : any Church - whether Orthodox, Greek, Catholic, Protestant or Lutheran - that claims to be the sole repository of truth, with its councils and dogmas, and its lack of tolerance manifested in the definition of heresies and excommunications, shows that it is in reality no more than a civil institution; and the same is true of "the thousands of sects that are enemies of one another," and "all other religions have had the same history. " The struggles between churches to predominate are absurd, and testify only to the falsity that has been introduced into religion. For Christian doctrine forbids quarrelling. In fact, "only Christianity that is not hindered by any civil institution, independent, true Christianity, can be tolerant".

In history, this pseudo-Christianity originated with the Council of Nicaea, when men gathered in assembly to declare that truth was what they decided to call truth; and "the root of evil was hatred and malice, against Arius and the others". This "deception" led to the Inquisition and the burning at the stake of John Huss and Savonarola. There had been a precedent in Scripture, where in a superstitious account of a meeting of the disciples the indisputability of what they said was attributed to a "tongue of fire". But Christian doctrine does not derive its veracity from the authority of ecclesiastics, nor from any miracle, nor from an object said to be sacred like the Bible.

"Man has only to begin, and he will see if the doctrine comes from me," Tolstoy repeats. The Church ("and there are many of them") has thus reversed the relationship between reason and religion, and rejects reason out of attachment to tradition. But as Ruskin, Rousseau, Emerson, Kant, Voltaire, Lamennais, Channing, Lessing and others have explained: "It is men working for the truth by acts of charity, who are the body of the Church that has always lived and will live forever"; "Everything has been said and there is nothing to add" about "the future of Catholicism".

The object of all theology is to prevent understanding," by distorting the meaning and words of Scripture; the elaboration of dogmas and the invention of sacraments (communion, confession, baptism, marriage, etc.) serves only "for the material benefit of the Church". The biblical accounts of creation and original sin are myths; the dogma of Christ's divinity a crude interpretation of the expression "Son of God"; the Immaculate Conception and the Eucharist "delusions"; the Trinity, "3=1," an absurdity, and Redemption contradicted by all the facts that show suffering and wicked men. The dogmas are difficult or impossible to understand and their fruits are bad ("envy, hatred, executions, banishments, murder of women and children, burning at the stake and torture"), while the morals are clear to everyone and their fruits are good ("provide nourishment.... all that is joyful, comforting, and serves as a beacon for us in our history"). So anyone who claims to believe in Christian doctrine must choose: "the Creed or the Sermon on the Mount".

"True religion can exist in all so-called sects and heresies, only it certainly cannot exist where it is joined to a state using violence". Thus, we can understand that Pascal "could believe in Catholicism, preferring to believe in it than to believe in nothing"; and Thomas a Kempis, Augustine, Tikhon of Zadonsk, Francis of Assisi and Francis de Sales helped to show the true doctrine of Christ; but "they would have been even more charitable and exemplary if they had not shown themselves obedient to false doctrines."

Tolstoy and Esperanto

A convinced Esperantist, Tolstoy made it known in a letter dated April 27, 1894 to Vasilij Lvovič Kravcov and the Voronež Esperantists that he was in favor of Esperanto, an international language he said he had learned in two hours.

"I found volapük very complicated and, on the contrary, Esperanto very simple. Having received, six years ago, a grammar book, a dictionary and articles in Esperanto, I was able, after two short hours, if not to write it, at least to read it fluently. The sacrifices that any man in our European world will make, by devoting some time to its study, are so small, and the results that can flow from it so immense, that one cannot refuse to make the attempt."

In February 1895, Tolstoy published an article entitled "Reason and Faith" in La Esperantisto magazine, prompting the Russian Empire to censor the paper in Russia.

Tolstoy and vegetarianism

A former hunter, Leo Tolstoy adopted a vegetarian diet in 1885. He advocated "vegetarian pacifism" and respect for life in all its forms, even the most insignificant. He wrote that by killing animals "man needlessly represses in himself the highest spiritual aptitude - sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself - and that by thus violating his own feelings, he becomes cruel". He therefore considered the consumption of animal flesh to be "absolutely immoral, since it involves an act contrary to morality: killing".

Tolstoy the teacher

Tolstoy wanted to free the individual from both physical and mental slavery. In 1856, he gave his land to the serfs, but they refused, thinking he would swindle them. So he asked himself over and over again: "Why, why don't they want freedom?

He was an outstanding pedagogue. He travels around the world and says that everywhere, school teaches servitude. Pupils stupidly recite lessons without understanding them. Bringing children directly into contact with culture means abandoning this tedious and sterile programming, which goes from the simplest to the most complicated. Children are interested in lively, complicated subjects where everything is intertwined. "What should children be taught? Tolstoy imagines an abundance of cultural places, where children would learn by frequenting these places.

Tolstoy anarchist Christian mystic

Tolstoy always claimed to be a Christian, and later formalized his political anarchism through the expression of a mysticism of freedom entirely rooted in the example of Christ. Tolstoy denounced the validity of authority and all forms of power aimed at limiting personal freedom in numerous articles with a resolutely anarchist tone, motivated by a thoughtful faith in the Christian injunction to serve others. The social paradigm derived from the Golden Rule is celebrated by Leo Tolstoy as that of a world dedicated to the fulfillment of all in mutual respect and personal exaltation.

The idea that only obedience to the moral law should govern mankind, expressed with all the power of his art in his work "The Kingdom of God is Within You", earned Tolstoy the label of anarchist, which he never refuted, simply pointing out that his anarchism related only to human laws that his reason and conscience did not approve of.

Influenced by Proudhon and Kropotkin, Tolstoy, deeply attached to the Gospel, is convinced that human consciousness is guided by the divine light revealed in Jesus. Because of his anti-ecclesiastical rhetoric, he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church.

His writings, which bear some resemblance to Buddhism, influenced Russian anarchist mystics of the early 20th century, including George Chulkov, Vasily Nalimov (en) and Alexis Solonovich. The conjunction of these two dimensions - mysticism and anarchism - in many of Tolstoy's writings made a strong impression on the young Gandhi. The latter came into contact with Tolstoy, a correspondence ensued, and Gandhi claimed throughout his life to be a "disciple" of Tolstoy's thought. Historian Henri Arvon describes Leo Tolstoy as an anarchist.

"The question for a Christian is not whether or not a man has the right to destroy the present state of things... as the question is sometimes intentionally and very often unintentionally posed by the opponents of Christianity" - but how should I act in relation to the violence manifested by governments in social, international and economic relations. Tolstoy's answer to this question is a rule of Christian conduct that can and should be considered satisfactory to every reasonable man; for he appeals to their conscience: "If you are not able to do to others what you would like them to do to you, at least do not do to them what you would not like them to do to you." The obligation of conscience, religious or simply human, not to swear, not to judge, not to condemn and not to kill means that a man, believer or not, cannot take part in courts, prisons, governments and armies.

While anarchists see government itself as evil, Tolstoy writes:

Tolstoy could hardly be called an anarchist thinker; for while there are similarities, "... humanist doctrines (which) maintain that they have nothing in common with Christianity, - socialist, communist and anarchist doctrines - are in fact nothing more than partial expressions of Christian conscience", the difference of opinion is clear: "the idea that men could live without government; this would be the doctrine of anarchy, with all the horrors that go with it". Very concretely, in a letter in which Tolstoy explains Henry George's project to a Siberian peasant, he gives him an idea of the manner and amount of taxes he would have to pay for the "public needs of the state", - which is absolutely incompatible with anarchist ideas, Tolstoy would lean more towards minarchism

Kropotkin says he "came to share the ideas expressed by Tolstoy in War and Peace on the 'role played by the unknown masses in historical events'", but whereas the former advocated socialist anarchism, with a socialist organization of production, and considered that conflicts and wars could arise in the evolution of mankind "in spite of the will of individuals taken in particular", the latter described as superstitious the idea that some could organize the future lives of others through socialism, judged revolutionary ideas to be unrealistic, and ardently believed in the abolition of all war through the evolution of each man's individual consciousness, Christ's teaching responding to the demands of reason and the natural feeling of love.

Tolstoy and patriotism

On the question of the fatherland, Leo Tolstoy's writings include The Christian Spirit and Patriotism (1894), Patriotism and Government (1900), A Soldier's Notebook (1902), The Russo-Japanese War (1904), Salute to the Refractory (1909) and The Tale of Ivan the Imbecile (1886).

In Patriotism and Government (1900), Tolstoy shows how "patriotism is a backward, inopportune and harmful idea... Patriotism as a sentiment is a bad and harmful sentiment; as a doctrine is a foolish doctrine, since it is clear that, if every people and every state holds itself to be the best of peoples and states, they will all be in gross and harmful error". He goes on to explain how "this outdated idea, although in flagrant contradiction with the whole order of things that has changed in other respects, continues to influence men and direct their actions". Only the rulers, using the easily hypnotized stupidity of the people, find it "advantageous to maintain this idea, which no longer has any meaning or use". They succeed because they possess "the most powerful means of influencing men" (subjugation of the Press and University, police and army, money).

Great novels

In Astapovo, Russia, Tolstoy's house preserves the writer's memorabilia, including his death mask (formerly owned by French writer Paul Bourget) and a cast of his hand. In central Moscow, in the Khamovniki district, the writer's authentic wooden house is preserved, where he spent some twenty years, from 1882 to 1901. Among its directors were the head of the Public Administration, Nikolai Ivanovich Goutchkov, and the collector Lev Lvovich Catoire. It had been unanimously decided to purchase the writer's property at the expense of the State Treasury and establish a museum there. The property had been bought for 125,000 roubles, a sum that Tolstoy's widow had divided among the many descendants. On April 23, 1912, the Tolstoy family held a farewell party in the house to mark their final departure from the estate. It was the Soviet government that created the museum and took charge of its restoration. Today, the Tolstoy Museum remains one of the few examples of wooden houses built in Moscow before the fire of 1812.

Sources

1. Leo Tolstoy
2. Léon Tolstoï
3. En orthographe précédant la réforme de 1917-1918 : Левъ Николаевичъ Толстой.
4. Troyat, Henri (2001). Tolstoy (em inglês). [S.l.]: Grove Press
5. A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (1988), p. 146
6. Rajaram, M. (2009). Thirukkural: Pearls of Inspiration. New Delhi: Rupa Publications. pp. xviii–xxi
7. Tolstojs voornaam Lev wordt doorgaans in het Nederlands vertaald als Leo. Zijn achternaam wordt ook wel getranslitereerd als Tolstoi. Volgens de catalogus van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek verschenen er tussen 2010 en 2015 Nederlandse uitgaven van zijn werk onder de namen Leo Tolstoj, Leo Tolstoi, L.N. Tolstoj, Lev Tolstoj en Lev Nikolajevitsj Tolstoj.
8. Volgens de gregoriaanse kalender. Op dat moment werd in Rusland nog de juliaanse kalender gebruikt. Volgens die na de Russische revolutie afgeschafte kalender is hij geboren op 28 augustus en gestorven op 7 november.
9. Reader's Digestː Mindennapi élet az ókortól napjainkig; 2006, 144. o.