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Leo Tolstoy

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Leo Tolstoy

   Leo Tolstoy, late in life.
         Born:        August 28 1828
                      Yasnaya Polyana, Russia
         Died:        20 November 1910
                      Astapovo, Russia
     Occupation(s):   Novelist
       Genre(s):      realistic fiction
   Literary movement: Christian anarchist
                      pacifist
      Influenced:     Mahatma Gandhi
                      Martin Luther King, Jr.

   Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й (
   help· info), Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj), commonly referred to in English
   as Leo Tolstoy ( September 9, 1828 [ O.S. August 28] – November 20,
   1910 [ O.S. November 7]) was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist,
   philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer,
   vegetarian, moral thinker and an influential member of the Tolstoy
   family.

   Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists,
   particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna
   Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian
   life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral
   philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance
   through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn
   influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
   Luther King, Jr.

Biography

   Count Leo (pronounced in his family circle as "Lyov", not "Lev") was
   born on his father's estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula guberniya
   of Central Russia. The Tolstoys are a well-known family of old Russian
   nobility, the writer's mother was born a Princess Volkonsky, while his
   grandmothers came from the Troubetzkoy and Gorchakov princely families.
   Tolstoy was connected to the grandest families of Russian aristocracy;
   Alexander Pushkin was his fourth cousin. The fact of belonging by birth
   to the best Russian nobility marks off Tolstoy very distinctly from the
   other writers of his generation. He always remained a class-conscious
   nobleman who cherished his impeccable French pronunciation and kept
   aloof from the intelligentsia.

Early life

   Tolstoy's childhood and boyhood were passed between Moscow and Yasnaya
   Polyana, in a large family of three brothers and a sister. He has left
   us an extraordinarily vivid record of his early human environment in
   the wonderful notes he wrote for his biographer Pavel Biryukov. He lost
   his mother when he was two, and his father when he was nine. His
   subsequent education was in the hands of his aunt, Madame Ergolsky, who
   is supposed to be the starting point of Sonya in War and Peace. (His
   father and mother are respectively the starting points for the
   characters of Nicholas Rostov and Princess Marya in the same novel).

   In 1844, Tolstoy began studying law and Oriental languages at Kazan
   University, where teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling
   to learn." He found no meaning in further studies and left the
   university in the middle of a term. In 1849 he settled down at Yasnaya
   Polyana, where he attempted to be useful to his peasants but soon
   discovered the ineffectiveness of his uninformed zeal.
   The Church of St. Nicholas in Khamovniki, of which Tolstoy was a
   parishioner before his excommunication.
   Enlarge
   The Church of St. Nicholas in Khamovniki, of which Tolstoy was a
   parishioner before his excommunication.

   Much of the life he led at the university and after leaving it was of a
   kind usual with young men of his class, irregular and full of
   pleasure-seeking — wine, cards, and women — not entirely unlike the
   life led by Pushkin before his exile to the south. But Tolstoy was
   incapable of that lighthearted acceptance of life as it came. From the
   very beginning, his diary (which is extant from 1847 on) reveals an
   insatiate thirst for a rational and moral justification of life, a
   thirst that forever remained the ruling force of his mind. The same
   diary was his first experiment in forging that technique of
   psychological analysis which was to become his principal literary
   weapon.

Military career and first literary efforts

   Tolstoy's first literary effort was a translation of A Sentimental
   Journey Through France and Italy. Sterne's influence on his early works
   was substantial, although he subsequently denigrated him as "a devious
   writer". To the year 1851 belongs his first attempt at a more ambitious
   and more definitely creative kind of writing, his first short story, "A
   History of Yesterday". In the same year, sick of his seemingly empty
   and useless life in Moscow, which brought heavy gambling debts, he went
   to the Caucasus, where he joined an artillery unit garrisoned in the
   Cossack part of Chechnya, as a volunteer of private rank, but of noble
   birth (юнкер). In 1852 he completed his first novel Childhood and sent
   it to Nikolai Nekrasov for publication in the Sovremennik. Although
   Tolstoy was annoyed with the publishing cuts, the story had an
   immediate success and gave Tolstoy a definite place in Russian
   literature.

   In his battery Tolstoy lived the rather easy and unoccupied life of a
   noble officer of means. He had much spare time, and most of it was
   spent in hunting. In the little fighting he saw, he did very well. In
   1854 he received his commission and was, at his request, transferred to
   the army operating against the Turks in Wallachia, where he took part
   in the siege of Silistra (located in North-Eastern Bulgaria). In
   November of the same year he joined the garrison of Sevastopol. There
   he saw some of the most serious fighting of the century. He took part
   in the defense of the famous Fourth Bastion and in the Battle of
   Chernaya River, the bad management of which he satirized in a humorous
   song, the only piece of verse he is known to have written.

   In Sevastopol he wrote the Sebastopol Sketches, widely viewed as his
   first approach to the techniques to be used so effectively in War and
   Peace. Appearing as they did in the Sovremennik monthly while the siege
   was still on, the stories greatly increased the general interest in
   their author. In fact, the Tsar Alexander II was known to have said in
   praise of the author of the work, "Guard well the life of that man."
   Soon after the abandonment of the fortress, Tolstoy went on leave of
   absence to Petersburg and Moscow. The following year he left the army,
   thoroughly disgusted with the meaningless carnage he had witnessed.

Between retirement and marriage

   The years 1856-61 were passed between Petersburg, Moscow, Yasnaya, and
   foreign countries. In 1857 (and again in 1860-61) he traveled abroad
   and returned disillusioned by the selfishness and materialism of
   European bourgeois civilization, a feeling expressed in his short story
   Lucerne and more circuitously in Three Deaths. As he drifted towards a
   more oriental worldview with Buddhist overtones, Tolstoy learned to
   feel himself in other living creatures. He started to write Kholstomer,
   which contains a passage of interior monologue by a horse. Many of his
   intimate thoughts were repeated by a protagonist of The Cossacks, who
   reflects, falling on the ground while hunting in a forest:

     'Here am I, Dmitri Olenin, a being quite distinct from every other
     being, now lying all alone Heaven only knows where – where a stag
     used to live – an old stag, a beautiful stag who perhaps had never
     seen a man, and in a place where no human being has ever sat or
     thought these thoughts. Here I sit, and around me stand old and
     young trees, one of them festooned with wild grape vines, and
     pheasants are fluttering, driving one another about and perhaps
     scenting their murdered brothers.' He felt his pheasants, examined
     them, and wiped the warm blood off his hand onto his coat. 'Perhaps
     the jackals scent them and with dissatisfied faces go off in another
     direction: above me, flying in among the leaves which to them seem
     enormous islands, mosquitoes hang in the air and buzz: one, two,
     three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million mosquitoes, and all of
     them buzz something or other and each one of them is separate from
     all else and is just such a separate Dmitri Olenin as I am myself.'
     He vividly imagined what the mosquitoes buzzed: 'This way, this way,
     lads! Here's some one we can eat!' They buzzed and stuck to him. And
     it was clear to him that he was not a Russian nobleman, a member of
     Moscow society, the friend and relation of so-and-so and so-and-so,
     but just such a mosquito, or pheasant, or deer, as those that were
     now living all around him. 'Just as they, just as Uncle Eroshka, I
     shall live awhile and die, and as he says truly: "grass will grow
     and nothing more".'

   These years after the Crimean War were the only time in Tolstoy's life
   when he mixed with the literary world. He was welcomed by the
   litterateurs of Petersburg and Moscow as one of their most eminent
   fellow craftsmen. As he confessed afterwards, his vanity and pride were
   greatly flattered by his success. But he did not get on with them. He
   was too much of an aristocrat to like this semi-Bohemian
   intelligentsia. All the structure of his mind was against the grain of
   the progressive Westernizers, epitomized by Ivan Turgenev, who was
   widely considered the greatest living Russian author of the period.
   Turgenev, who was in many ways Tolstoy's opposite was also one of his
   strongest praises calling Tolstoy's 1862 short novel The Cossacks, "The
   best story written in our language."
   Portrait by Ivan Kramskoi (1873).
   Enlarge
   Portrait by Ivan Kramskoi (1873).

   Tolstoy did not believe in progress and culture and liked to tease
   Turgenev by his outspoken or cynical statements. His lack of sympathy
   with the literary world culminated in a resounding quarrel with
   Turgenev (1861), whom he challenged to a duel but afterwards apologized
   for so doing. The whole story is very characteristic and revelatory of
   his character, with its profound impatience of other people's assumed
   superiority and their perceived lack of intellectual honesty. The only
   writers with whom he remained friends were the conservative
   "landlordist" Afanasy Fet and the democratic Slavophile Nikolay
   Strakhov, both of them entirely out of tune with the main current of
   contemporary thought.

   In 1859 he started a school for peasant children at Yasnaya, followed
   by twelve others, whose ground-breaking libertarian principles Tolstoy
   described in his 1862 essay, "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". He also
   authored a great number of stories for peasant children. Tolstoy's
   educational experiments were short-lived, but as a direct forerunner to
   A.S.Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can
   justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of
   libertarian education.

   In 1862 Tolstoy published a pedagogical magazine, Yasnaya Polyana, in
   which he contended that it was not the intellectuals who should teach
   the peasants, but rather the peasants the intellectuals. He came to
   believe that he was undeserving of his inherited wealth, and gained
   renown among the peasantry for his generosity. He would frequently
   return to his country estate with vagrants whom he felt needed a
   helping hand, and would often dispense large sums of money to street
   beggars while on trips to the city. In 1861 he accepted the post of
   Justice of the Peace, a magistrature that had been introduced to
   supervise the carrying into life of the Emancipation reform of 1861.

   Meanwhile his insatiate quest for moral stability continued to torment
   him. He had now abandoned the wild living of his youth, and thought of
   marrying. In 1856 he made his first unsuccessful attempt to marry (Mlle
   Arseniev). In 1860 he was profoundly affected by the death of his
   brother Nicholas, which was for him the first encounter with the
   inevitable reality of death. After these reverses, Tolstoy reflected in
   his diary that at thirty four, no woman could love him, since he was
   too old and ugly. In 1862, at last, he proposed to Sofia Andreyevna
   Behrs and was accepted. They were married on 23 September of the same
   year.

Marriage and family life

   Tolstoy's wife Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya and daughter Alexandra
   Tolstaya.
   Enlarge
   Tolstoy's wife Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya and daughter Alexandra
   Tolstaya.

   His marriage is one of the two most important landmarks in the life of
   Tolstoy, the other being his conversion. Once he entertained a
   passionate and hopeless aspiration after that whole and unreflecting
   "natural" state which he found among the peasants, and especially among
   the Cossacks in whose villages he had lived in the Caucasus. His
   marriage provided for him an escape from unrelenting self-questioning.
   It was the gate towards a more stable and lasting "natural state".
   Family life, and an unreasoning acceptance of and submission to the
   life to which he was born, now became his religion.

   For the first fifteen years of his married life he lived in this
   blissful state of confidently satisfied life, whose philosophy is
   expressed with supreme creative power in War and Peace. Sophie Behrs,
   almost a girl when he married her and 16 years his junior, proved an
   ideal wife and mother and mistress of the house. On the eve of their
   marriage, Tolstoy gave her his diaries detailing his sexual relations
   with female serfs. Together they had thirteen children, five of whom
   died in their childhoods.

   Sophie was, moreover, a devoted help to her husband in his literary
   work, and the story is well known how she copied out War and Peace
   seven times from beginning to end. The family fortune, owing to
   Tolstoy's efficient management of his estates and to the sales of his
   works, was prosperous, making it possible to provide adequately for the
   increasing family.

Conversion

   Tolstoy had always been fundamentally a rationalist. But at the time he
   wrote his great novels his rationalism was suffering an eclipse. The
   philosophy of War and Peace and Anna Karenina (which he formulates in A
   Confession as "that one should live so as to have the best for oneself
   and one's family") was a surrender of his rationalism to the inherent
   irrationalism of life. The search for the meaning of life was
   abandoned. The meaning of life was Life itself. The greatest wisdom
   consisted in accepting without sophistication one's place in Life and
   making the best of it. But already in the last part of Anna Karenina a
   growing disquietude becomes very apparent. When he was writing it the
   crisis had already begun that is so memorably recorded in A Confession
   and from which he was to emerge the prophet of a new religious and
   ethical teaching.

   Following this conversion, the details of which are given below,
   Tolstoy's rationalism found satisfaction in the admirably constructed
   system of his doctrine. But the irrational Tolstoy remained alive
   beneath the hardened crust of crystallized dogma. Tolstoy's diaries
   reveal that the desires of the flesh were active in him till an
   unusually advanced age; and the desire for expansion, the desire that
   gave life to War and Peace, the desire for the fullness of life with
   all its pleasure and beauty, never died in him. We catch few glimpses
   of this in his writings, for he subjected them to a strict and narrow
   discipline. His magic touch did not suffer from his conversion,
   however. He wrote as effortlessly as ever and his late years produced
   admirable works of art, such as Hadji Murat, one of many pieces that
   appeared posthumously. It became increasingly apparent, that, in the
   words of Vladimir Nabokov, there were only two subjects that Tolstoy
   was really interested in and thought worth writing about — and these
   were life and death. The relationship between life and death was
   examined by him over and over again, with increasing complexity, in the
   final version of Kholstomer, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in How Much
   Land Does a Man Need?

Later life

   Leo Tolstoy with his granddaughter in Yasnaya Polyana.
   Enlarge
   Leo Tolstoy with his granddaughter in Yasnaya Polyana.

   Soon after A Confession became known, Tolstoy began, at first against
   his will, to recruit disciples. The first of these was Vladimir
   Chertkov, an ex-officer of the Horse Guards and founder of the
   Tolstoyans, described by D.S. Mirsky as a "narrow fanatic and a hard,
   despotic man, who exercised an enormous practical influence on Tolstoy
   and became a sort of grand vizier of the new community". Tolstoy also
   established contact with certain sects of Christian communists and
   anarchists, like the Dukhobors. Despite his unorthodox views and
   support for Thoreau's doctrine of civil disobedience, Tolstoy was
   unmolested by the government, solicitous to avoid negative publicity
   abroad. Only in 1901 the Synod excommunicated him. This act, widely but
   rather unjudiciously resented both at home and abroad, merely
   registered a matter of common knowledge — that Tolstoy had ceased to be
   an Orthodox Church-man.

   As his reputation among people of all classes grew immensely, a few
   Tolstoyan communes formed throughout Russia in order to put into
   practice Tolstoy's religious doctrines. And, by the last two decades of
   his life, Tolstoy enjoyed a place in the world's esteem that had not
   been held by any man of letters since the death of Voltaire. Yasnaya
   Polyana became a new Ferney — or even more than that, almost a new
   Jerusalem. Pilgrims from all parts flocked there to see the great old
   man. But Tolstoy's own family remained hostile to his teaching, with
   the exception of his youngest daughter Alexandra Tolstaya. His wife
   especially took up a position of decided opposition to his new ideas.
   She refused to give up her possessions and asserted her duty to provide
   for her large family. Tolstoy renounced the copyright of his new works
   but had to surrender his landed property and the copyright of his
   earlier works to his wife. His late marriage life has been described by
   A. N. Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history.

   Tolstoy was remarkably healthy for his age, but he fell seriously ill
   in 1901 and had to live for a long time in Gaspra and Simeiz, Crimea.
   Still he continued working to the last and never showed the slightest
   sign of any weakening of brain power. Ever more oppressed by the
   apparent contradiction between his preaching of communism and the easy
   life he led under the regime of his wife, full of a growing irritation
   against his family, which was urged on by Chertkov, he finally left
   Yasnaya, in the company of his daughter Alexandra and his doctor, for
   an unknown destination. After some restless and aimless wandering he
   headed for a convent where his sister was the mother superior but had
   to stop at Astapovo junction. There he was laid up in the
   stationmaster's house and died on November 7, 1910. He was buried in a
   simple peasant's grave in a wood 500 meters from Yasnaya Polyana.
   Thousands of peasants lined the streets at his funeral.

Novels and fictional works

   Tolstoy's grave in Yasnaya Polyana.
   Enlarge
   Tolstoy's grave in Yasnaya Polyana.

   Tolstoy's fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the
   Russian society in which he lived. Matthew Arnold commented that
   Tolstoy's work is not art, but a piece of life. Arnold's assessment was
   echoed by Isaak Babel who said that, "if the world could write by
   itself, it would write like Tolstoy".

   His first publications were three autobiographical novels, Childhood,
   Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856). They tell of a rich landowner's son and
   his slow realization of the differences between him and his peasants.
   Although in later life Tolstoy rejected these books as sentimental, a
   great deal of his own life is revealed, and the books still have
   relevance for their telling of the universal story of growing up.

   Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during
   the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastapol Sketches. His experiences
   in battle helped develop his pacifism, and gave him material for
   realistic depiction of the horrors of war in his later work.

   The Cossacks (1863) is an unfinished novel which describes the Cossack
   life and people through a story of Dmitri Olenin, a Russian aristocrat
   in love with a Cossack girl. This text was acclaimed by Ivan Bunin as
   one of the finest in the language. The magic of Tolstoy's language is
   naturally lost in translation, but the following excerpt may give some
   idea as to the lush, sensuous, pulsing texture of the original:

     Along the surface of the water floated black shadows, in which the
     experienced eyes of the Cossack detected trees carried down by the
     current. Only very rarely sheet-lightning, mirrored in the water as
     in a black glass, disclosed the sloping bank opposite. The rhythmic
     sounds of night — the rustling of the reeds, the snoring of the
     Cossacks, the hum of mosquitoes, and the rushing water, were every
     now and then broken by a shot fired in the distance, or by the
     gurgling of water when a piece of bank slipped down, the splash of a
     big fish, or the crashing of an animal breaking through the thick
     undergrowth in the wood. Once an owl flew past along the Terek,
     flapping one wing against the other rhythmically at every second
     beat.

   War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels
   ever written, remarkable for its breadth and unity. Its vast canvas
   includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story
   moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court
   of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and
   Borodino. The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in
   particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and
   Alexander. But more importantly, Tolstoy's imagination created a world
   that seems to be so believable, so real, that it's not easy to realize
   that most of his characters actually never existed and that Tolstoy
   never witnessed the epoch described in the novel.

   Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a
   novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written
   at that time to be novels). It was to him an epic in prose. Anna
   Karenina (1877), which Tolstoy regarded as his first true novel, was
   one of his most impeccably constructed and compositionally
   sophisticated works. It tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman
   trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a
   philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the
   peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives. His last novel
   was Resurrection, published in 1899, which told the story of a nobleman
   seeking redemption for a sin committed years earlier and incorporated
   many of Tolstoy's refashioned views on life.

   Tolstoy's later work is often criticised as being overly didactic and
   patchily written, but derives a passion and verve from the depth of his
   austere moral views. The sequence of the temptation of Sergius in
   Father Sergius, for example, is among his later triumphs. Gorky relates
   how Tolstoy once read this passage before himself and Chekhov and that
   Tolstoy was moved to tears by the end of the reading. Other later
   passages of rare power include the crises of self faced by the
   protagonists of After the Ball and Master and Man, where the main
   character (in After the Ball) or the reader (in Master and Man) is made
   aware of the foolishness of the protagonists' lives.

   Tolstoy had an abiding interest in children and children's literature
   and wrote tales and fables. Some of his fables are free adaptations of
   fables from Aesop and from Hindu tradition.

Reputation

   Tolstoy's contemporaries paid him lofty tributes: Dostoevsky thought
   him the finest of all living writers while Gustave Flaubert compared
   him to Shakespeare and gushed: "What an artist and what a
   psychologist!". Anton Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country
   estate, wrote: "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and
   pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing
   yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it
   might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does
   serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in
   literature."

   Later critics and novelists continue to bear testaments to his art:
   Virginia Woolf went on to declare him "greatest of all novelists", and
   James Joyce noted: "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never
   pedantic, never theatrical!". Thomas Mann wrote of his seemingly
   guileless artistry—"Seldom did art work so much like nature"—sentiments
   shared in part by many others, including Marcel Proust, William
   Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, who placed him above all other Russian
   fiction writers, even Gogol, and equalled him with Pushkin among
   Russian poets.

Religious and political beliefs

   Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1887) by Ilya Yefimovich Repin
   Enlarge
   Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1887) by Ilya Yefimovich Repin

   At approximately the age of 50, Tolstoy had a mid-life crisis, at which
   point he determined that he could not go on living without knowing the
   meaning of life, and so he vowed to either find it or commit suicide.
   After exploring a variety of areas, he found his answer in the
   teachings of Jesus, which in his interpretation have strong Buddhist
   overtones. He relates the story of his mid-life crisis in A Confession,
   and the conclusions of his studies in My Religion, The Kingdom of God
   is Within You, and The Gospels in Brief.

   The teaching of mature Tolstoy is a rationalized "Christianity",
   stripped of all tradition and all positive mysticism. He rejected
   personal immortality and concentrated exclusively on the moral teaching
   of the Gospels. Of the moral teaching of Christ, the words "Resist not
   evil" were taken to be the principle out of which all the rest follows.
   He rejected the authority of the Church, which sanctioned the State,
   and he condemned the State, which sanctioned violence and corruption.
   His condemnation of every form of compulsion authorizes us to classify
   Tolstoy's teaching, in its political aspect, as Christian anarchism.

Christian anarchism

   Though he did not call himself an anarchist because he applied the term
   to those who wanted to change society through violence, Tolstoy is
   commonly regarded as an anarchist. Tolstoy's Christian beliefs were
   based on the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly on the phrase about
   turn the other cheek, which he saw as a justification for pacifism,
   nonviolence and nonresistance. Tolstoy believed being a Christian made
   him a pacifist and, due to the military force used by his government,
   being a pacifist made him an anarchist.

   Tolstoy's doctrine of nonresistance ( nonviolence) when faced by
   conflict is another distinct attribute of his philosophy based on
   Christ's teachings. By directly influencing Mahatma Gandhi with this
   idea through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy has had
   a huge influence on the nonviolent resistance movement to this day. He
   also opposed private property and the institution of marriage and
   valued the ideals of chastity and sexual abstinence (discussed in
   Father Sergius and his preface to The Kreutzer Sonata), ideals also
   held by the young Gandhi.

   In hundreds of essays over the last twenty years of his life, Tolstoy
   reiterated the anarchist critique of the State and recommended books by
   Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, whilst rejecting anarchism's
   espousal of violent revolutionary means, writing in the 1900 essay, "On
   Anarchy":

     The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the
     existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there
     could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing
     conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be
     instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there
     being more and more people who do not require the protection of
     governmental power ... There can be only one permanent revolution -
     a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.

Pacifism

   Room of Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana.
   Enlarge
   Room of Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana.

   Despite his misgivings about anarchist violence, Tolstoy took risks to
   circulate the prohibited publications of anarchist thinkers in Russia,
   and corrected the proofs of Peter Kropotkin's "Words of a Rebel",
   illegally published in St Petersburg in 1906. Two years earlier, during
   the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy publicly condemned the war and wrote to
   the Japanese Buddhist priest Soyen Shaku in a failed attempt to make a
   joint pacifist statement.

   A letter Tolstoy wrote in 1908 to an Indian newspaper entitled " Letter
   to a Hindu" resulted in intense correspondence with Mohandas Gandhi,
   who was in South Africa at the time and was beginning to become an
   activist. Reading "The Kingdom of God is Within You" had convinced
   Gandhi to abandon violence and espouse nonviolent resistance, a debt
   Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy "the greatest
   apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". The
   correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi would only last a year, from
   October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to
   give the name the Tolstoy Colony to his second ashram in South Africa.
   Besides non-violent resistance, the two men shared a common belief in
   the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy's essays
   (see Christian vegetarianism).

   Along with his growing idealism, Tolstoy also became a major supporter
   of the Esperanto movement. Tolstoy was impressed by the pacifist
   beliefs of the Doukhobors and brought their persecution to the
   attention of the international community, after they burned their
   weapons in peaceful protest in 1895. He aided the Doukhobors in
   migrating to Canada.

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