Leo Tolstoy – A Very Short Introduction

This is a superb short work highlighting the essence of Tolstoy and his contribution, including specific chapters on war and peace, love, death, what Tolstoy believed and what he believed people should do. His passionate hope was for the end of war and the enactment of brotherly love, about which he wrote both in his novels and his religious work related to the New Testament. He experienced war at first hand, and his descriptions of the wounded are brutally gruesome. Death features both in War and Peace and also searingly in Ivan Ilyich. He developed a philosophy of nonviolence from the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, extracting five rules for living (p. 72). Later in his life, he was concerned with questions of social justice and became a vegetarian in 1892, also giving up smoking and drinking. There is much moral inspiration and vision to be derived from his later works, as Gandhi found out.