Leo Tolstoy: Encyclopedia II - Leo Tolstoy - Religious and political beliefs

Leo Tolstoy - Religious and political beliefs

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. He felt very isolated in these beliefs, suffering on occasion with depression so severe that if he saw a rope it made him think of hanging himself, and hiding his guns to stop himself from committing suicide.

Tolstoy believed that a Christian should look inside his or her own heart to find inner happiness rather than looking outward toward the Church or state. His belief in nonviolence when facing oppression is another distinct attribute of his philosophy. By directly influencing Mahatma Gandhi with this idea through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You (full text of English translation can be found here), Tolstoy has had a huge influence on the nonviolent resistance movement to this day. He believed that the aristocracy were a burden on the poor, and that the only solution to how we live together is through anarchy. 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). 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 The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man, where the main character (in Ilyich) or the reader (in Master and Man) is made aware of the foolishness of the protagonists' lives.

Tolstoy had a profound influence on the development of anarchist thought. Prince Peter Kropotkin wrote of him in the article on anarchism in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica:

A letter Tolstoy wrote to an Indian newspaper entitled "Letter to a Hindu" resulted in a long-running correspondence with Mohandas Gandhi, who was in South Africa at the time and was beginning to become an activist. The correspondence with Tolstoy strongly influenced Gandhi towards the concept of nonviolent resistance, a central part of Tolstoy's view of Christianity. Along with his growing idealism, he 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.

In 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy condemned the war and wrote to the Japanese Buddhist priest Soyen Shaku in a failed attempt to make a joint pacifist statement.

Tolstoy was an extremely wealthy member of the Russian nobility. He came to believe that he was undeserving of his inherited wealth, and was renowned 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, much to his wife's chagrin.

He died of pneumonia at Astapovo station in 1910 after leaving home in the middle of winter at the age of 82. His death came only days after gathering the nerve to abandon his family and wealth and take up the path of a wandering ascetic—a path that he had agonized over pursuing for decades. Thousands of peasants lined the streets at his funeral.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Religious and political beliefs", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki