Tolstoy, Lev (Leo) Nikolaevich(1828–1910)
Lev (Leo) Nikolaevich Tolstoy, the renowned Russian novelist, won worldwide fame as a moralist and sage for his antiecclesiastical interpretation of Christianity and fervent preaching of nonviolence. A well-read amateur in philosophy from the age of fifteen, Tolstoy displayed serious philosophical interests in his greatest novel, War and Peace (1865–1869), and in 1874 he began an increasingly anguished philosophical and religious quest, seeking a reason for living. His spiritual crisis, dramatically described in My Confession (1879), was resolved by a return to the Christian faith of his youth, but in a radically different form based on his reading of selected New Testament texts. The new creed, further elaborated in such works as What People Live By (1881) and What I Believe (1883), was the foundation for the philosophical and hortatory works on morality, society, and culture that dominated his writing during the last three decades of his life.
Philosophy of History
Tolstoy conceived War and Peace as a grand historical narrative embodying conclusions he had reached, partly under the influence of Schopenhauer, concerning causality in history and especially the interplay of freedom, chance, and necessity; the novel's two epilogues address these themes explicitly. It is in the nature of human consciousness, Tolstoy argued, to conceive of oneself and others as free agents whose actions may have a significant impact on the world—in the case of so-called great figures like Napoleon, a determining impact.
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