Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Analysis

A melancholic Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy sits silently looking off into the serene nature scape ahead of him, sipping from his cup of tea, reminiscing upon the lessons of a long life. His mind is buzzing with heartfelt confessions, and the perpetual nagging of questions that are as old as mankind itself. Tolstoy spent much of his life searching the heavens and the earth, in hopes to one day grasp a true understanding to the question, “what is the meaning of life?” Ultimately, his journey came to focus on knowledge and faith. The study of both, along with his analysis of fellow man, led him to procure epiphanies not yet experienced in his life. Tolstoy would use the words of thinkers such as, Buddha, Socrates, and Schopenhauer, to reinforce his

After a childhood and early manhood poisoned by horror, war, sin, and an angst filled youth, Tolstoy took to writing. Later in his life, he would recognize the hubris he exemplified in the joy that he felt when others acknowledged his work. Tolstoy professed that, to write for this reason, was to nurture the gluttonous ego man possessed. Soon, Tolstoy would adopt the virtue, “it is more blessed to give than to receive”(Acts 20:35), but for the time being, he would revel in the presence of fellow writers and thinkers who fostered his passions. He felt as if he had a faith in knowledge and poetry, he considered himself one of its priests. It took only a matter of a few years for him to see how such a beautiful faith could be infiltrated by the corrupt nature of man. Because of this time in his life, he came to realize that he and his fellow writers knew nothing, they couldn’t even answer the most simple of philosophic questions. Between his thirties and forties Tolstoy felt as if he was completely intellectually mature, that he had, “reached that summit from which life reveals itself only to stand there like an utter fool, clearly seeing that there is nothing in life, that there never was and never will be”(Tolstoy 31). This manifested debilitating perturbation within Tolstoy, his life became dull and his thoughts grim. He likened his

Tolstoy was raised on upperclass orthodox ideologies, but in his youth he recalled coming to believe God did not exist. He witnessed the believers in his social stratum live their lives defying the principals of faith, therefore coming to the belief that the teachings of faith had no relevancy in life. He perceived the whole of the upperclass as corrupted and those of Orthodox faith to be narrow-minded, immoral, and narcissistic people. Even the actions of his beloved family, and especially those of his own, gave him inconceivable and tormenting strife. Tolstoy, despite valiant effort, could not succumb to accepting the very faith of his fellow upperclass Russians. He would eventually elaborate on his perception of their faith saying, “I saw that what they took to be faith did not explain the meaning of life but only obscured it”(Tolstoy 64). Even amongst unfaltering feelings of disdain for these pseudo believers, Tolstoy reasoned that, “no matter how irrational and unattractive the answers given by faith, they have the advantage of bringing to every reply a relationship between the finite an the infinite, without which there can be no reply”(Tolstoy 60). It is rather common for someone wrestling with a philosophical question, to only ask and reflect upon what it is they seek. On the other hand, Tolstoy has presented us with profound logic