A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Bushkovitch Paul

Author:Bushkovitch, Paul [Bushkovitch, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781139215886
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-12-14T21:00:00+00:00

For Tolstoy the real issues of life were not political, they were moral. Pierre Bezukhov and his spiritual pilgrimage in particular incarnated the desire to act in a moral manner and to find what meaning might be hidden behind the rush of everyday life and the mindless acceptance of inherited values and institutions. Prince Andrei Bolkonskii is his opposite, the rational analyst of warfare, events, and human beings. Ultimately it is Pierre who finds happiness, first learning from the peasant Platon Karataev and his humility and faith in God, and then in family life with Natasha Rostova. Much of Tolstoy was in Pierre, not only his experiments with schemes to benefit the peasants on his estate but also in his spiritual search.

After the success of War and Peace Tolstoy turned again to pedagogy and several schemes for new novels. The outcome was Anna Karenina in 1875–1877. This was the story of the aristocratic Anna, her lover Vronskii and her bureaucrat husband, contrasted with Levin and his wife Kitty, again a portrait of Tolstoy, a happy family life contrasted with Anna’s disastrous affair. While he was writing the book, however, Tolstoy went through the final and deepest spiritual crisis of his life.

Tolstoy’s was a religious crisis. Haunted by death and the problem of the meaning of life, he turned to philosophy and religion, but could not make out which religion he should follow. He first turned to Orthodoxy, the religion in which he had been brought up, mainly on the grounds that it was the religion of the peasantry and he wanted to remain close to them and their wisdom. Orthodoxy, however, did not satisfy him. The liturgy left him cold, and he disliked the enthusiastic support of the church for the state and all its doings – warfare, oppression, and capital punishment – all already unacceptable in his mind.

Finally in 1879–80 he began to read the Bible intensively, particularly the Gospels, and came to the conclusion that the core of the teaching of Christ was non-resistance to evil. (“I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Matt. 5:39) In Tolstoy’s mind, everything flowed from that principle. It meant that the state, in fighting crime or foreign enemies, was basically un-Christian, and that the only proper stance was radical pacifism and a sort of Christian anarchism. He developed these ideas in a series of long tracts, the Confession that recounted his inner development toward these views as well as accounts of what he saw as true Christianity. Needless to say, none of these works could be published in Russia though they circulated widely underground and attracted to him a small but devoted following.

Tolstoy did not abandon literature, in 1899 he published his last major novel, Resurrection, about a prostitute wrongly convicted of a murder and her spiritual rebirth (this book was banned in Russia) and he wrote Khadji Murat, a novella of the Caucasian Wars.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.