An open library of thought
Seek a meaning that death cannot undo, and refuse violence.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present three of Tolstoy’s philosophical and religious works. The novels, stories, diaries, letters, What I Believe, What Then Must We Do? and the Gospel translations are not indexed here; the Jubilee edition in 90 volumes, published from 1928 to 1958, remains the reference text.
011879–1882
Written between 1879 and 1882 as the opening of a larger body of religious writings, it was banned by the ecclesiastical censorship and first printed in Geneva in 1884. The narrative reconstructs the crisis in retrospect and should not be read as a diary.
021897–1898
After some fifteen years of work, the treatise appeared in censored form in a Moscow journal in 1897 and 1898; Aylmer Maude’s English translation of 1898, made from the manuscript, gave the first uncensored text. Its examples range from Beethoven and Wagner to the French decadent poets.
031890–1893
Completed in 1893, the book was banned in Russia and circulated first abroad, in Russian and in translation. It draws on Quaker writers and on the American abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou, and closes with a train of soldiers sent to punish peasants, which Tolstoy met in 1892.