Léon Tolstoï
At fifty he saw no meaning in anything; he found it again in the faith of simple people.
Life
Russian writer (Yasnaya Polyana 1828 - Astapovo 1910), author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Around the age of fifty a crisis over the meaning of life led him to a personal Christian faith, which he read as an ethic of kindness and of refusing to answer evil with violence. This thought, set out in the Confession and The Kingdom of God Is Within You, influenced readers such as Gandhi.
Main works
A vast novel of the Napoleonic era in which characters search for the meaning of their lives and for the place of freedom in history.
He tells of his crisis over the meaning of life, written in 1879-1882, and of his return to faith as a condition for living.
A novella about a man who, facing death, realises that his comfortable life was empty.
He defends the refusal of violence drawn from the Gospels and criticises obedience to the state and to war.
In his own words
« Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, a knowledge by which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the force of life. »
вера есть знание смысла человеческой жизни, вследствие которого человек не уничтожает себя, а живет. Вера есть сила жизни.
« If a man lives, he believes in something. If he did not believe that there is something to live for, he would not live. »
Если человек живет, то он во что-нибудь да верит. Если б он не верил, что для чего-нибудь надо жить, то он бы не жил.
« The truth was that life is meaningless. »
Истина была то, что жизнь есть бессмыслица.
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceAfter his crisis he concludes that to know God is to live, and that life cannot go on without believing in Him.
Tolstoy, A Confession (1882)
Consciousness tells us we are free, but reason and history show necessity; he concludes we must renounce a freedom that does not exist.
Tolstoy, War and Peace, Second Epilogue (1869)
Morality rests on love and on Christ's commands, above all non-resistance to evil, not on consequences or abstract duty.
Tolstoy, What I Believe (1884); The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894)
He finds that rational knowledge cannot answer the question of life's meaning, which only faith answers.
Tolstoy, A Confession (1882)
Reason alone shows life to be meaningless; the meaning is found in the faith of simple working people.
Tolstoy, A Confession (1882)