Leo Tolstoy
Seek a meaning that death cannot undo, and refuse violence.
Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, turned in mid-life to the question of what gives life a meaning that death does not destroy. His answer, a rational Christianity centred on the Sermon on the Mount and stripped of dogma and church authority, led him to condemn state violence, private property in land and art made for an idle elite, and it inspired movements of nonviolent resistance.
What meaning does my life have that death will not destroy?
Biography
Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, turned in mid-life to the question of what gives life a meaning that death does not destroy. His answer, a rational Christianity centred on the Sermon on the Mount and stripped of dogma and church authority, led him to condemn state violence, private property in land and art made for an idle elite, and it inspired movements of nonviolent resistance.
02 /Philosophy
Following Matthew 5:39, Tolstoy holds that evil must never be answered with violence, because coercion reproduces the evil it claims to suppress; the principle condemns war, criminal courts and the death penalty alike.
03 /Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
04 /Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
A first reading.
Meaning in the face of death
Follow the crisis of A Confession from the questions that halt a successful life to the faith by which working people live.
A ConfessionSincere art and its counterfeits
Test Tolstoy’s definition of art as the transmission of lived feeling against the works you value most.
What Is Art?Nonviolence and conscience
Examine how The Kingdom of God Is Within You turns the Sermon on the Mount into a critique of the state.
The Kingdom of God Is Within You