By the following year he had published a semi-
autobiographical trilogy on his childhood and youth and a
group of short stories on the war in the Caucasus and at Se-
vastopol. These works soon brought him fame.
Tolstoy made the first of two trips to western Europe
in 1857 and was repelled by the absence of spiritual values
and the materialism he found there. In Paris he witnessed a
public execution and from it concluded that all governments
were immoral. During his second trip abroad in 1860 his fa-
vorite brother, Nikolai, who had tuberculosis, died in Tol-
stoy’s arms. The next year Tolstoy returned to Russia and
resumed teaching at the Yasnaia Poliana school.
In 1862 Tolstoy married Sof’ia Andreevna Bers, eigh-
teen years old. They had thirteen children, of whom five
died. The first decade of his marriage was the happiest time
of his life. During this period he wrote War and Peace (1863–
1869).
Tolstoy’s concern with moral development and religion
was evident from his childhood. At the age of nineteen he
wrote out rules of behavior for himself that were close to the
precepts of his later Christianity. In 1855 he wanted to
found a new religion, free of dogma and mysticism. Happi-
ness would be achieved not in heaven but on earth, by fol-
lowing the voice of one’s conscience. His letters from the
1850s on, and his literary works from Childhood (1852) to
Anna Karenina (1873–1877), reflect the development of his
ideas.
Beginning in the early 1870s, Tolstoy engaged in a
moral and religious quest that was to continue until the end
of his life. He had begun reading Schopenhauer in 1867 and
was influenced by Schopenhauer’s negative view of life. In
the fall of 1869, while on a trip to buy land, he stopped at
the provincial town of Arzamas, staying overnight at an inn.
There, in the middle of the night, he had a terrifying vision
of death. From this time on, Tolstoy was obsessed with
thoughts of his own death—although earlier works, like
Three Deaths (1859), were witness that the problem of death
had been on his mind for years. It was this obsession that led
to his search for a viable religious faith, one that would make
life worth living and would reconcile him to the bitter fact
that he too must die.
Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis began during the writing of
Anna Karenina and lasted until 1879. It is mirrored in the
seekings of Levin, the novel’s hero, and is akin to the spiritual
quest that had occupied Pierre Bezukhov, the hero of War
and Peace. But whereas War and Peace had ended in opti-
mism, in Anna Karenina a dark force seems to take over.
Levin cannot accept a materialist explanation for his life.
That would be “the mockery of Satan,” the power that re-
mains in the universe if there is no God. This power is Scho-
penhauer’s blind force of will, the same force that destroys
Anna. Levin thinks that suicide is the only possible escape
from his situation.
In A Confession, which he wrote from 1879 to 1882,
Tolstoy described his own crisis. Reason and the sciences
gave him no answer to his questions, which marriage and
family life had stifled only temporarily. He read extensively,
but the thinkers he studied—Socrates, Solomon, Buddha,
Schopenhauer—all concluded that life was an evil and that
the greatest good was to free oneself of one’s existence. Tol-
stoy then turned to the peasants. He saw that their simple
faith in God gave their life meaning. They did not fear death,
which they regarded as the natural outcome of life. Tolstoy
concluded that the answer was simply to believe, without
reasoning. Belief in God and in the possibility of moral per-
fection made life meaningful. The peasants’ faith, however,
was bound up with Orthodox ritual and dogma, which Tol-
stoy could not accept. He ended A Confession promising to
study the scriptures and the church’s doctrines in order to
separate the truth in them from falsehood.
Tolstoy taught himself Greek and Hebrew in order to
read the biblical texts in the original. In his Translation and
Harmony of the Four Gospels (1880–1881) he rearranged the
Gospels, rewriting or eliminating material he thought in-
comprehensible or untrue. Miracles, including the resurrec-
tion, were discarded. Tolstoy’s version presented the tenets
of Christianity as he saw them. He said that this book was
the most important thing he had written. The other prom-
ised work, A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology (also 1880–
1881), was an attack on the Orthodox church. In it, Tolstoy
examined the church’s doctrines and said they were distor-
tions of the true teachings of Christ, who had wanted only
love, humility, and forgiveness.
His next book, What I Believe (1882–1884), was a sum-
ming-up of Tolstoy’s creed. He listed in it five command-
ments of Christ: (1) do not be angry; (2) do not lust; (3) do
not swear oaths; (4) do not resist evil with force; (5) love all
persons without distinction. Observance of these rules would
transform life on earth by putting an end to courts of law,
governments, and wars between nations. Tolstoy’s other reli-
gious and moralistic works, such as On Life (1887) and The
Kingdom of God Is within You (1892–1893), contained essen-
tially the same ideas as the earlier ones. All of these books,
including A Confession, were banned by the censor, but they
circulated in underground editions or were published abroad
and smuggled into Russia.Tolstoy’s new religion was essentially a system of per-
sonal ethics, the same rules he had been trying to live by since
boyhood. The church, he said, had obscured true Christiani-
ty with ritual, miracles, and symbols. It tried to keep from
people the true Christ, a man and not a divine being, who
wanted to unite men in peace and make them happy. Tol-
stoy’s Christianity was based primarily on the sermon on the
mount, and especially on Christ’s principle of turning the
other cheek (Mt. 5:38–42). God had placed the light of con-
science within each person. By heeding their inner voice,
people would act with simple truthfulness and love and
would achieve happiness. The only way to combat evil was
by a constant effort at self-perfection, not by opposing the
evil of others with force. If each person does good whenever9220 TOLSTOY, LEO