Leo Tolstoy | ClassicMotivation.com

Before the Work

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the Tula region of Russia, the fourth of five children of a count. His mother died when he was two. His father died when he was nine. He was raised by aunts and tutors and grew up with the contradictions that would define his life: privilege and discomfort, intellectual ambition and moral restlessness, a facility for pleasure and a conviction that pleasure was wrong.

He spent his twenties dissipating — gambling, drinking, pursuing women, enlisting in the army and serving in the Caucasus and then in the Crimean War — while also writing. Childhood (1852) and The Cossacks established him as a significant writer. War and Peace, published in installments from 1865 to 1869, and Anna Karenina, published from 1875 to 1877, established him as one of the greatest novelists in any language.

Then, at approximately fifty, he had a spiritual crisis of devastating completeness. He described it in A Confession, published in 1882: he could find no reason to continue living. The fame, the wealth, the family, the literary achievement — none of it answered the question of why, and without an answer to that question he could not go on. He came very close to suicide. He pulled himself back through an encounter with the religious faith of ordinary peasant people, which seemed to him to contain something authentic that the educated classes had lost. He converted to a form of Christianity stripped of institutional church — no priests, no sacraments, no supernatural claims — and spent the last thirty years of his life trying to live accordingly.

The Philosophy

Tolstoy's philosophy after his conversion is a radical Christian morality: non-resistance to evil by violence, the rejection of private property, the equality of all people regardless of class or education, and the conviction that the simple life of manual labor and service is more genuinely good than the life of intellectual achievement and social distinction. He gave away his copyrights (over his family's strong objection), tried to give away his property, worked in the fields alongside peasants, made shoes, and continued to write — now primarily philosophical and polemical works rather than novels, though some of his late fiction, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murat, are masterpieces.

What makes Tolstoy relevant to this library is the seriousness with which he took the question that his crisis posed: given that I will die, and that everyone I love will die, and that everything I have built will be forgotten, what reason is there to act? This is the question that Frankl addresses from one direction (meaning survives death), that the Stoics address from another (virtue is its own justification), and that Tolstoy addresses from a third (love and service are intrinsically worthwhile regardless of outcome). His wrestling with the question — in A Confession, in What Then Must We Do, in What Is Art — is among the most honest in the tradition.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novella published in 1886, is his most concentrated philosophical statement: a man who has spent his life pursuing conventional success dies in agony and terror, and in his final hours discovers that the only thing in his life that was genuinely real and good was the simple, uncalculating love of a peasant servant who sat with him without judgment. It is one of the most powerful arguments in literature for the priority of genuine human connection over every form of achievement.