Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula province, Russia, on 9 September 1828 (28 August, Old Style), and died at the Astapovo railway station on 20 November 1910 (7 November, Old Style). Born into the high nobility, he served in the army, was at Sevastopol during the Crimean War, and devoted himself to literature and to managing his estate. He published War and Peace (1865–1869) and Anna Karenina (1873–1877), two of the central works of the realist novel.

In the late 1870s he went through a deep spiritual crisis, recounted in A Confession (written between 1879 and 1882), in which he describes the loss of life’s meaning and the search for an answer in the faith of simple peasants and in the Gospel. From then on he defended a Christianity stripped of dogma and ecclesiastical institution, centered on the Sermon on the Mount and, above all, on the precept of not resisting evil by violence. In The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893–1894) he drew political consequences from this reading: a critique of the state, of military service, and of institutional violence. In What Is Art? (1897) he criticized elitist art and argued that its value lies in its capacity to communicate morally elevated feelings. He was excommunicated by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.

In War and Peace, especially in the epilogue, Tolstoy also offers a reflection on the philosophy of history: he rejects the explanation of events by the will of “great men” and holds that history results from an immense sum of individual actions, generally inaccessible to knowledge. Isaiah Berlin took up this theme in The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) became a literary and philosophical reference on finitude and the authenticity of life.

Key Concepts

  • Nonresistance to evil by violence — a reading of the Sermon on the Mount as a practical rule of conduct, including the refusal of military service and state coercion.
  • Christianity without dogma — a recovery of the Gospel’s ethics, separated from ecclesiastical authority and supernatural elements.
  • Crisis of meaning — the question of meaning in the face of death, developed in A Confession and in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
  • Philosophy of history — a critique of the great-man theory in War and Peace.
  • Art as the communication of feeling — the central thesis of What Is Art?.
  • Simplicity and manual labor — an ideal of ascetic, agrarian life, the basis of the Tolstoyan movement.

Influenced by

  • The Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau — a reading of his youth, important in his formation
  • Arthur Schopenhauer — whom Tolstoy read from 1869 and whose influence he acknowledged
  • Russian peasants and popular spirituality

Influenced

  • Mahatma Gandhi — corresponded with Tolstoy in 1909–1910 and declared himself influenced by The Kingdom of God Is Within You
  • The Tolstoyan movement and the traditions of pacifism and conscientious objection
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein — who read Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief during the First World War
  • Isaiah Berlin — a reading of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history

Works

War and Peace (1865–1869); Anna Karenina (1873–1877); A Confession (1879–1882); The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886); The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893–1894); What Is Art? (1897); Resurrection (1899).

See also

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, Russian Philosophy