Leo Tolstoy by Liza Knapp

Author:Liza Knapp [Knapp, Liza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192543554
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

What Tolstoy believed

As he approached the age of 50, Tolstoy experienced what is often described as a spiritual crisis. He struggled to finish Anna Karenina. Once the novel was done, Tolstoy devoted the next several years to religious life. As a first step, he attempted to return to the fold of the Russian Orthodox Church and to share in the faith of the Russian folk. But he soon doubted the Church’s doctrines, rituals, and practices. So Tolstoy struck out on his own to identify what he thought was the essence of Jesus’s teachings. For him, the core (shared with other world religions) was the call to love others and God. Tolstoy produced a series of religious and theological works that included, in close succession from 1879 to 1884, his Confession, An Examination of Dogmatic Theology, Translation and Harmonization of the Gospels, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe (sometimes translated as My Religion). These were followed up a decade later by The Kingdom of God Is Within You, in which he expands on his doctrine of non-resistance to evil.

For several years after Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote largely on religious topics. Before his death in 1883, fellow Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev wrote to Tolstoy that his own ‘song was sung’, but that Tolstoy should go back to writing fiction. Although Turgenev did not live to read it, Tolstoy continued, fitfully, to write fiction that included the masterpieces ‘Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (1885) and ‘Hadji Murat’ (written between 1896 and 1904; published 1912) (Figure 5).

5. Tolstoy at work in 1891, by Ilya Repin.

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