In 2012, as we worked on our study of the war on terror’s impact on Muslim tribal societies, we searched for a metaphor to frame and explain the dynamic that we were observing across the world. It was at the time of the precipitous rise in the use of drones as a weapon of war, and we found, in the 40 case studies of Muslim peoples that we examined, that these weapons were being used first and foremost in tribal societies. These were peoples living at the peripheries of modern states, often in difficult to access locales like mountains and deserts—places like the Pakistan tribal regions, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
For centuries, Muslim tribes had attempted to preserve their independence from modern centralised states, but now, in the context of the “war on terror,” the attention of the entire world and the most advanced military technology was being focused on these regions. This is because US policymakers had identified them as the “ungoverned spaces” where terrorists were hiding. Local state governments, attempting to extend their own central authority and defeat perceived threats to their rule and legitimacy, linked up with Washington to carry out the war on terror. Yet while vast societies were thrown into chaos and hundreds of thousands of people were killed—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Yemen, and Mali to name a few—the problem of terrorism did not cease.
We found that many people in such societies living on the periphery viewed the relentless violence they experienced at the hands of governments to be an existential threat to themselves and their way of life, and they held firm in fighting the “centre.” Not only were the tribes subjected to attacks from the US, its allies, and state governments, but they also faced violence from militant groups from within their own societies. Nowhere was safe. While the 9/11 attacks had initiated the “war on terror,” people in these tribal societies would say, “every day is like 9/11 for us.”
We soon discovered that over a century prior, the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had given the perfect metaphor for the interaction between the state and the tribes in his novel Hadji Murad, which he completed in 1904. The novel was about a real-life Muslim tribal leader in the Caucasus who fought against Russia, which was attempting to bring the mountainous region under its rule in the nineteenth century. Tolstoy was a first-hand witness to Russia’s attempt to subjugate the tribes while he served in the Russian army. And yet, Tolstoy was impressed by the pride and courage of both Hadji Murad and his people.
Despite achieving global fame with Anna Karenina, Tolstoy fell into a deep despair that led him to reject his aristocratic life and embrace a radical interpretation of Christian non-violence
Tolstoy expressed his feelings in the novel’s opening scene through the narrator, who, while on a walk collecting a bouquet of flowers, noticed a thistle. He leaned down “to pluck the flower. But this proved a very difficult task. Not only did the stalk prick on every side—even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my hand—but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly five minutes, breaking the fibres one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the stalk was all frayed, and the flower itself no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful.” The narrator concludes: “But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!…‘What energy!’ I thought. ‘Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won’t submit.’”[1] The thistle, Tolstoy wrote elsewhere, “fights for life till the end and, alone in the middle of the whole field, somehow manages to win the fight.”[2]
Russia, Tolstoy was saying, could attempt to brutally subdue the tribes, but at what cost? The tribes would not yield—they would cling tenaciously to their religion, culture, and identity. The tribes were rejecting the Russian argument that incorporation into the mighty Russian Empire would be a blessing as they would join the modern world and receive the benefits of scientific advancement and “civilisation.”
With Tolstoy’s image in mind, we titled our study The Thistle and the Drone.[3] The title captured the ongoing struggle across the world between modern technology such as drones and instruments of surveillance used by centralised, hierarchical, and often corrupt state structures, and tribal societies, which have an ethos of egalitarianism and attempt to preserve their independence and identity. In the current world, the thistle was refusing to yield against the onslaught of the drone.
At the book’s conclusion, we presented ways in which the conflicts and violence between centre and periphery could be resolved, including treating tribal peoples with empathy, dignity, and honour and enabling them to be a part of and benefit from states on their own terms, such as via federal arrangements. This would allow them to preserve core aspects of their identity and integrity while also joining the modern world. If this could be done, the US and the nations of the world would be much safer from the threat of terrorism and people of different backgrounds could live their lives in peace, prosperity, and security.
The Thistle and the Drone gave us further insight into the genius of Tolstoy. As a writer, Tolstoy stands as a literary giant among giants, emerging from a period of high-quality writers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. Tolstoy’s novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina are widely considered to be among the greatest ever written. He was also known for his pacifist views and his ideas of peaceful “non-resistance” against oppressive and violent states. Tolstoy was a sensitive person grappling with the big questions of life and society, sincerely seeking God and trying to live a simple and moral life. He attempted to rouse the consciousness of the world and lead it in a more just, peaceful, compassionate, and loving direction. His pacifism became a movement in his own lifetime and profoundly influenced great figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet today the man who inspired them is much less well known, and if he is, it is as a novelist rather than the public intellectual, philosopher, and social activist he also was.
For us, the authors, Tolstoy is a great “Mingler,” a person who embraced all of humanity regardless of race, ethnicity, nation, or religion. Tolstoy saw all the world’s people as part of a single unitary whole, and in his own impassioned work which included but went far beyond his novels, he attempted to spread this message. His literature, renowned for its realism, introduced his audience to many ordinary people of different backgrounds and their struggles in life. Through Tolstoy’s empathetic eye, the audience feels for these characters, understands them, and is able to reflect on morality and the universal aspects of life which all humans face. Deeply inspired by Jesus Christ, Tolstoy tried to break down all barriers which separated people from one another. He spoke incessantly and above all else of the power and necessity of love. In his work such as Hadji Murad he displayed a keen cross-cultural curiosity and sensitivity, and in his extensive educational efforts he attempted to open the Russian mind to the great wealth of humanity’s diverse religious and cultural legacy. With these lessons, Tolstoy felt that Russia and humanity in general would be able to meet the profound challenges of the modern age: urbanisation, mechanisation, industrialisation, wealth disparity and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small elite, technological development, and the accumulation of totalitarian state power. While the world of Tolstoy’s time was rapidly transforming and many hailed a new age of human and scientific progress, Tolstoy felt that if not handled in the right way, these developments could lead to the deaths of untold millions of people and global catastrophe. While Russia was embroiled in political debates between groups such as Marxist revolutionaries, liberal reformers, and conservative nationalists, Tolstoy presented an alternative to all of them in the moral positions he took. Tolstoy looked at the rapidly changing modern world through the lens of love and compassion, values which were constantly being challenged in the real world. In his thinking, style of public writing and communication, and even appearance, he resembled a Biblical prophet bringing a message of love to humanity.
In this piece, we wish to highlight Tolstoy’s thinking on the “Other”—people who are ethnically, racially, religiously, or nationally “different” from one’s own self and group. Over a lifetime of scholarship, artistic work, and philosophical study, Tolstoy seriously and soberly reflected on the problem of discord, ignorance, hatred, and violence between peoples and how these ills could be ameliorated. Our world today, as Tolstoy’s was, is beset by wars, violence against minorities, government authoritarianism, exclusionary nationalism, surveillance, societal polarisation, stark wealth disparities, massive and rapid technological changes such as the coming of AI, and fears for the future of humanity. In this perilous environment, Tolstoy’s lessons and solutions for our predicament are crucial for us to consider and learn from.
The life of Tolstoy
Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his family estate, near Tula, Russia, 200 kilometres south of Moscow. His family was aristocratic and one of the most prominent in Russia. Tolstoy’s ancestor was said to have arrived in what is today Ukraine from Lithuania in the fourteenth century, and his descendants settled a century later in Moscow, which was quickly becoming the political centre of Russia. The Grand Prince of Moscow, in gratitude for the family’s service, gave Tolstoy’s ancestor the affectionate name “tolstoy,” meaning “fat.” In 1724, Tolstoy’s great-great-great grandfather, Peter, was made a Count of the Russian Empire by Tsar Peter the Great, a title Tolstoy inherited. In the nineteenth century, prominent Tolstoys made their mark in different fields—Alexander Ivanovich Osterman-Tolstoy (1770-1857), a military commander in Russia’s victory over Napoleon, the painter Feodor Petrovich Tolstoy (1783-1873), the Russian Minister of Education Dmitri Andreevich Tolstoy (1823-1889), and the poet and playwright Alexei Constantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875).[4] Tolstoy’s father, Count Nikolai Tolstoy, was a veteran of the 1812 war against Napoleon, while his mother, Mariya, was a princess of the Volkonsky family. The Volkonskys claimed descent from the Rurikid Dynasty, which Russians hold to have to have originated the Russian Monarchy in the ninth century.
Tragedy struck early in Tolstoy’s life as his mother died when he was two years old, and his father died when he was nine. This left Tolstoy in the care of relatives who raised him. Growing up, Tolstoy was taught by tutors, a usual practice among the aristocracy. At the age of 15, he began his studies in at the University of Kazan, east of Moscow. Kazan was the former capital of the Tatar Khanate of Kazan prior to its conquest by Russia. Even at this early age, Tolstoy’s cross-cultural interests were perceptible, as he applied to this university due to its reputation for Oriental languages. Tolstoy’s great-great-great grandfather, Peter, had been Russian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and Tolstoy was interested in becoming a diplomat himself. He embarked on his studies in the Arabic and Turco-Tatar languages, and was taught by the renowned Azerbaijani Orientalist scholar and philologist Mirza Kazem-Bek. He failed the freshman year exam, however, and decided to take up law instead, which he similarly dropped, and left university without securing a degree.[5]
Upon leaving university, Tolstoy inherited his parents’ estate, including the village of Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy now owned the manor house, the village, and the serf population of 350, in addition to their families. In Russia, a lord had total power over their serfs. The lord could “make them his personal servants or send them into the army, permit or forbid their marriages, flog them within an inch of their lives.”[6] Yet soon after securing this inheritance, Tolstoy displayed what would be a lifelong dedication to educating and uplifting the Russian peasantry, a commitment that would further intensify following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. He began in Yasnaya Polyana, opening a school for peasants in the late 1840s.[7]
What mainly characterised his life during this period, however, was what he described as pleasure, gambling, and debauchery among the aristocracy in places like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1851, he joined the army, and was posted to the Caucasus, where he fought against Chechen tribes as an artilleryman. Subsequently, he commanded an army unit during the Crimean War. Here he experienced the famous siege of Russian-held Sevastopol by Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia, which inspired great literary works including Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Tolstoy’s own Sevastopol Sketches. Tolstoy had already begun writing at this point, but the publication of Sevastopol Sketches brought him celebrity. In his writing on the siege, Tolstoy has been described as “one of the first ‘war correspondents.’”[8]
Tolstoy left the army and returned to St. Petersburg, where he moved in literary circles alongside such figures as Turgenev. He now decided to focus more intently on education, opening another peasant school in 1859, and some twenty schools were founded by 1862.[9] At a time when most peasants were illiterate, Tolstoy believed that education was a human right and that every person should have access to education—as Tolstoy said, humans seek education “as they love and seek air for breathing.”[10] Tolstoy also traveled west during this period to places like Britain, Germany, and France to learn about how they approached education while attempting to develop his own “Russian” method, with a particular focus on the peasantry. While his schools did not last very long due to government interference and he was not able at this stage to form a school movement for Russia’s peasantry, the experience was formative for him and shaped many of his later passions in improving the life of the poor. Later, his ABC Book was adopted by the Russian Ministry of Education for use in Russian public schools.[11]
Following his marriage in 1862 and the birth of his first child, Tolstoy settled down to a domestic life at his Yasnaya Polyana estate where he would remain for the rest of his life. Here he wrote prodigiously, including the vast and sprawling War and Peace, which he began in 1863 and finished in 1869. He followed this masterwork with Anna Karenina, published in 1878. These works were immediate sensations, and Tolstoy’s fame grew in Russia and around the world.
Tolstoy as prophetic figure
Yet, despite his success, Tolstoy was unhappy. While working on Anna Karenina, he experienced a personal crisis of meaning. “I felt lost and fell into despair,” he said, afflicted with an “inner disease.”[12] He told himself, “Well fine, so you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world, and so what?”[13]
While Tolstoy until this point had not considered himself to be religious, he now embarked on and became consumed by a religious quest which lasted the rest of his life. Tolstoy found meaning in the example and teachings of Jesus, which Tolstoy took very seriously in terms of his own life. In his attempt to understand Jesus, Tolstoy looked not to the institution of the church or to its rituals and dogmatic rules, but to what he saw as Jesus’ inner or core message. He became convinced that the message of Jesus was one of total and complete pacifism and non-violence, that there was, as he put it, an “impossibility of reconciling Christianity with force and war.”[14] Of particular importance was Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, with its exhortations to love your enemies and to be peaceful in every aspect of life. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says “Do not resist evil,” a statement which shaped Tolstoy’s view of non-violent resistance.
Tolstoy saw violence all around him. He had witnessed it firsthand in the army. But he detected and was disturbed by violence even beyond the great numbers of people who were being killed in wars as the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth. One stark example was the subjection of the peasants. Even after they were emancipated from serfdom, they were being brutalised and held in check by violence, for example in their treatment by the upper classes and business and factory owners. With his growing religious awareness, Tolstoy was increasingly conscious of his own class position and the manner in which the monarchy and aristocracy was running Russia, remarking, “our life, the life of the wealthy classes, is non-stop theft and robbery.[15] He perceived vast class discrepancies forming—a small elite was growing increasingly prosperous while the vast majority of people could not secure the basic wages it took to live a decent life. While Tolstoy was observing these trends in Russia, he also observed them in different levels of intensity across Europe and beyond.
As his thinking developed, Tolstoy focused in particular on the modern state. The state operated primarily through violence, Tolstoy argued, and did not protect the interests of the citizenry. Instead, the state was run by the upper classes who used it to perpetuate their privileged status at the expense of the larger population. While Tolstoy lived in autocratic Russia, he also argued that the same pattern was evident in democracies, because in these states politicians were preoccupied with retaining power.[16] In democracies, he pointed out, a majority group which secures 51 percent of the vote can then use mechanisms of state violence to oppress the losing 49 percent.[17] Aristocrats and elected leaders both, then, had an interest in using state power to preserve their position.[18]
Tolstoy believed that the people who run modern states also use violence almost unthinkingly because they have bleak views of human nature. They often believe that humans are “dreadful creatures…governed by nothing except hatred and madness”[19] and they must act in the name of
protecting the “good” from “bad” people.[20] The rulers of states have grown up since childhood in such an environment, Tolstoy contended, which leads them to overlook their common humanity with the people their policies directly impact, and they fail to question their underlying bleak assumptions which are reinforced by “scientific” theories.[21]
Tolstoy explained that unlike in past centuries, when one kingdom conquered another and many ordinary people were basically left alone, the modern state seeks to control the lives of people, and it does this through coercive and violent means—the police and security services, the judicial system, the penal system, the use of capital punishment, and the army, which turns men into “machines.”[22] Humans used to kill each other face to face, forcing them to deal with the consequences of their deeds, but now with new technology, “the consequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the action.”[23] Tolstoy described the modern state, citing the Russian writer Alexander Herzen, as “Genghis Khan with the telegraph,” which perpetuated “atrocious infamies, inconceivable under the Neros.”[24] Tolstoy additionally observed that in modern states, armies are most often used not against other countries, but against their own citizens.[25]
It is notable that Max Weber, who provided among the most durable definitions of the state which is still widely cited, “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” reached this conclusion “after Weber had been studying Tolstoy at length and had been considering writing an essay or even a book about him.”[26]
None of the modern state’s violent practices, Tolstoy believed, were compatible with Christianity and the message and example of Jesus. He noted how in Russia, the Orthodox Church in its close partnership with the state was endorsing and making this situation possible. Tolstoy believed that modernity was causing Russians, and many people around the world, internal psychological distress and despair.[27] Deep down, he argued, people knew that the immense scale of violence, killing, and oppression the modern state participates in is immoral, but they keep going and try not to think about it. This, Tolstoy says, is hypocrisy. Violence and killing must never be accepted, Tolstoy taught, and he implored the Christians of Russia to follow what he believed was the authentic message of Jesus.
On this basis, Tolstoy urged non-compliance with the modern state, whether in Russia or elsewhere in the world. While Tolstoy condemned all violence such as that by non-state actors including terrorists, revolutionaries, and anarchists, he always pointed out that no entity kills more than states.[28] Tolstoy had little confidence in the leadership of Russia or any other modern country, remarking, “I am seriously convinced that the world—countries and estates and houses—is governed by people who are quite mad. Those who are not mad refrain from taking part.”[29]
Tolstoy’s solution to the problems of his age was a revolution of love. In his own life, Tolstoy adopted simple, peasant-style dress, made his own shoes, and renounced his celebrated title of “Count.” While Tolstoy advocated a simple life on Jesus’ model, he repeatedly made the point that Jesus’ message of brotherhood, non-violence, and human unity was also found in other religions, and he closely studied the world’s major religious texts and took much from them. He published a series of works outlining his new outlook on life and how others could follow this path including Confession (1882), What I Believe (My Religion) (1884), and The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), in addition to a myriad of essays, letters, statements, and fictional stories using these themes, such as the short story “Where Love Is, God Is” (1885). He took up public causes in support of persecuted pacifist religious sects and organised aid programs for the urban poor as well as famine victims. He believed that raising people’s consciousness through his works was contributing to a progression of human society towards being more loving to one another—which Tolstoy believed was the only way for humans to coexist and deal with modernity without facing destruction.
For many of Tolstoy’s adoring fans, however, the work he embarked on after his religious awakening was a bizarre and unwelcome deviation from his sublime earlier literary creations. “Why, I ask myself,” said the great composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, “should this man, who more than all his predecessors has power to depict the human soul with such wonderful harmony” relegate himself to being “a preacher and set himself up to be our teacher and monitor?”[30] US President Theodore Roosevelt similarly complained, “Tolstoy, his novels are good, but his so-called religious and reformatory writings constitute one of the age-forces which tell seriously for bad.”[31] Furthermore, Roosevelt said, Tolstoy now “dresses like a clown.”[32] In fact, many of the themes of Tolstoy’s religious and political writing are evident in his earlier novels such as War and Peace.
Tolstoy’s religious and political writings also apparently accounted for his not being granted the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the most famous Nobel snubs in history. According to Carl David af Wirsén, head of the Swedish Academy which bestowed the prize, Tolstoy had “detestable opinions on art, government, and civilisation”[33] and possessed a “hostility to all forms of civilisation.”[34] Yes, novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina were “immortal creations,” Wirsén stated, but he believed that if the Academy so honored Tolstoy, it would be perceived as endorsing his opinions, which was out of the question.[35]
In Russia, Tolstoy’s views put him on a collision course with the government as both attempted to define Russian identity—as one journalist put it, “We have two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy.”[36] Tolstoy received death threats, he was constantly monitored by the Tsar’s secret police, his works were banned, and he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church, which declared him “dangerous” and an “enemy.”[37] The government minced no words in condemning what it called “Tolstoy’s abominations” and many of Tolstoy’s followers were punished by the state for possessing his writings.[38]
And yet, Tolstoy was unfazed and kept up his work. His impact outside of his home country was vast, and he attracted disciples from across the world who came to meet him in Yasnaya Polyana. He was “one of the first international mass-media celebrities,” and greatly impacted the literatures of nations including China, Turkey and Egypt.[39] In Bulgaria, there were four publishing houses that existed solely to publish Tolstoy’s work, and he was by far the most translated foreign writer in Japan in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[40] He corresponded with people across the world, including Gandhi, who named one of his ashrams “Tolstoy Farm” and described himself as “a humble follower of that great teacher.”[41] Gandhi stated that he had been “a believer in violence” until he read Tolstoy’s work, which “made me a firm believer in ahiṃsā [non-violence].”[42] Tolstoy’s decision to wear peasant clothing also inspired Gandhi to adopt Indian peasant clothing including his iconic loincloth and shawl.[43] Tolstoy, Gandhi said, was “the greatest apostle of nonviolence produced by this age.”[44]
Another admirer was Muhammad Abduh, the prominent Islamic scholar and Grand Mufti of Egypt, who told Tolstoy, “may God…preserve your strength and may He open the doors of men’s hearts to understand what you say, and may He urge their souls to imitate what you do.”[45] In the United States, Black rights organisations such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the Urban League, and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), were founded by followers of Tolstoy.[46] The great sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP, said of Tolstoy, “Now and then a human being has courage enough to do the extraordinary thing…here is a man that dared try. Who had before him a vision of simplicity, poverty, unselfishness and peace, such as would transform the world and make it anew if a sufficient number of people would follow in his footsteps.”[47] Tolstoy’s followers in the Tolstoyan movement set up their own small societies and settlements in Russia and around the world where they could live a life of peace and non-violence. Tolstoy was writing of love and peace until almost the moment of his death in 1910.
Tolstoy on God
To understand Tolstoy’s thinking on the “Other,” it is necessary first to understand how he interpreted God. For Tolstoy, God is “everything,” an unlimited total unity.[48] He uses terms to describe God including the “one,”[49] “the All,”[50] “being,”[51] the “Source,”[52] and the “one essence.”[53] While, from one perspective, humans draw distinctions between people, plants, animals, or anything else—and “there can be an infinite number of divisions of the world[54]—from another perspective, all these differentiated things are connected, and this connection is God. As Tolstoy explains, “everything which we know is nothing but just such a division of God”[55] and “we must understand him as filling all and at the same time as one.”[56] “A flower on a blossoming tree can think that it is a separate being,” Tolstoy said, “but all flowers are parts of the same blossoming of one apple tree, and they all come from one seed.”[57] The human relationship to God is captured in Tolstoy’s phrase, “I am a part, he is everything.”[58] All of us, Tolstoy affirmed, are “members of one great body.”[59]
From the perspective of the individual ego, we often think ourselves and our own wants and desires to be the most significant, but this according to Tolstoy is a kind of reversal of the actual order of things: “We are so accustomed to the thought that everything is for us, that the earth is mine, that when we come to die we are surprised that my earth, something belonging to me, will be left, but not me. The chief mistake here is thinking of the earth as something acquired, an appendage of me, whereas I am acquired by the earth and am an appendage of it.”[60]
As Tolstoy understood it, religion is all about the desire of the individual to seek God, to seek one’s incorporation into the unity of which we all are a part. As Tolstoy writes of his empathetic central character Pierre in War and Peace, “Pierre glanced up at the sky and the play of the stars receding into the depths. ‘And it’s all mine, and it’s all within me, and it all adds up to me!’ thought Pierre.”[61] For Tolstoy, this unitary God is not neutral, but good and loving. As he writes, “I cannot fall anywhere except into him, and in him there is full joy and goodness.”[62]
In order to know God, all humans have the capacity to use their reason, Tolstoy taught, as through reason, we may know ourselves, and then our relationship to the divine unity. We may then gain an “awareness of our unity with everything.”[63] The person who discovers God “in ourselves discovers Him in everybody else, and vice versa.”[64]
The importance of love
While we can use our reason to understand, comprehend, and make sense of these relationships between each other and between humans and God, the ultimate way we experience them for Tolstoy is by feeling, and specifically through the emotion of love. It is analogous, Tolstoy states, to the feeling a baby has in its mother’s arms. A baby does not know who this person is who feeds and looks after it but “understands that there is someone who does this” and loves this force in whose power the baby rests.[65] Tolstoy at different times records himself experiencing such emotions of connection to the divine unity that he tells us he is unable to adequately reproduce in writing—in one example, he is out riding his horse when he has an experience in which “I...thought about my being a part of him…I felt love for him…I felt so happy.”[66]
Tolstoy defines love as “the striving of men’s souls towards unity.”[67] The relationship between humans and God is characterised by love, and “God is love” for Tolstoy.[68] This is at once a love for God, a desire to unite with the unity through love, and also to link oneself with the different elements of this unity, for example, other human beings. When we love someone, Tolstoy affirms, it seems as if we are in them and they are in us, and the separation dissolves.
Tolstoy presents a kind of sequence of loving awareness: “to know yourself through love of yourself, and then to know other creatures through love of these creatures: to transfer oneself in thought into another person, animal, plant or even stone.”[69] He elucidates, “First the family, then the commune, then the state, then mankind, then all living creatures, then the whole world.”[70] This is love itself, the “restoration of the seemingly broken unity between creatures. You go out of yourself and enter into another person. And you can enter into everything. Everything—you can merge with God, with Everything.”[71] In his literature, Tolstoy attempts to give us a sense of this possibility of transferring oneself in thought to others through love and empathy. In his story Kholstomer (1886), we are even taken inside the mind of a horse, and we view life and humans from his perspective.
Tolstoy advocates a universal love that knows no boundaries. Thus, we should, following Christ, love our neighbors and our enemies alike. While we commonly possess ill will for various people for different reasons, and particularly have stereotypes and negative perceptions about them, Tolstoy affirms, “if there is hatred even for one person, there can be no true love.”[72] We should love “especially…those who are alien to us and hate us.”[73] While “To love a bad person seems impossible,” Tolstoy argues, “one can and must love not the person, but the crushed and stifled God in him, and love that God and try to set Him free. That is not only possible, but a source of joy.”[74]
In any case, Tolstoy states, we are often ignorant of each other in our perceptions of them, and “Man has the faculty of not seeing the sufferings he doesn’t want to see.”[75] Tolstoy urges us to reach out, to come closer to the suffering of others and try to help.[76] When we do reach out, ignorance turns to knowledge and a correct understanding. We should act to “break down” the “wall” of “ignorance of what is going on in the souls of other people…and strive towards a union with the souls of other people.”[77]
This is the message of another of his stories, “Esarhaddon, King of Assyria” (1903). In this tale, King Esarhaddon conquers an enemy kingdom and is about to execute its king, Lailie. Before he can do so, however, a wise sage magically sends his consciousness into Lailie’s body. Now, Esarhaddon is Lailie and finds himself at war with Esarhaddon, and is defeated in battle. Just before Esarhaddon’s men execute Lailie (who is Esarhaddon), he wakes up from this experience and the sage tells him, “all life is one…You thought life dwelt in you alone, but I have drawn aside the veil of the delusion…You can only improve life in yourself by destroying the barriers that divide your life from that of others, and by considering others as yourself, and loving them.”[78]
Through his writings and advocacy, Tolstoy pursues and seeks to facilitate a “union of all, absolutely all people, without exception,”[79] which is a reflection and fulfilment of the unitary nature of the divine. It is possible for us to “love everyone and everything,”[80] all living things,[81] and, Tolstoy is confident, replace “the law of violence” with “the law of love. [82] Love, Tolstoy says, “must save us and become the basis of our life.”[83]
Tolstoy and the “Other”
While Tolstoy’s thinking is based in the message of Jesus, he was also curious to learn about other religions, and studied them assiduously over the course of his life. Tolstoy’s exploration of the thinking of the “Other” helped him consider and develop his own ideas about religion and the meaning of life. He felt great pleasure in reading the masterworks of religion from over the millennia and synthesised them into his own thought. In turn he presented this wisdom to the Russian people, the Christian world, and the wider world. On God, for example, Tolstoy stated, “we can say only what Moses and Mohammed said,—that he is one…that he is unicentric.”[84]
Tolstoy likewise expressed the value in harmonising oneself and outlook to the rhythms of nature in the manner of Eastern thought, writing, “Lao-Tzu says—one ought to be like water. When there are no obstacles it flows.”[85] It is a reminder of how, Tolstoy wrote, human happiness is linked to nature: “a life under the open sky, in the light of the sun, in the fresh air: a communion with the soil, with plants, and with animals.”[86] Of Lao Tzu’s idea of the “fulfilment of the law of nature,” Tolstoy affirmed, “that is wisdom, that is strength, that is life.”[87]
Tolstoy’s reading of non-Christian thinkers also helped him understand and interpret Christianity—he said, “Without him [Confucius] and Lao-Tzu the Gospels are not complete.”[88] In another example, this time drawing on Hindu philosophy, Tolstoy stated that in order for people to truly love each other, “they must, at least for a time, free themselves from what the Hindoos call ‘sansara,’ that turmoil of life which more than anything else keeps people from understanding the meaning of their existence.”[89]
There are links between Lao Tzu’s concept of Wu Wei or nonaction and Tolstoy’s philosophy of non-resistance. Tolstoy explained, citing “the Chinese sage” [Lao Tzu], that “men would be freed from all personal and especially from all social misfortunes…if they practised non-acting [Wu Wei].”[90] This message he felt was compatible with Jesus, and Tolstoy likened the Chinese word “Tao,—the Way” meaning “an activity in conformity with the eternal and fundamental law of human life” with Jesus’s statement that the truth will set you free.[91] In addition to drawing on such thinkers in his own work, Tolstoy also published works by sages like Lao Tzu and Confucius in Russian translations, thus playing a “significant role…in introducing Asian religious thought to the West.”[92]
Tolstoy believed that what he had observed in the message of Jesus was in fact present in other religions, as they all are engaged in the same pursuit: the human striving to reach and understand God, or the unity of all things. Tolstoy affirmed that “in every nation teachers have appeared” including “Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Christ, Mohammed,” who taught “what it is most necessary for men to know” and were concerned with “the true welfare, of each man and of all men.”[93] These religions reflected what Tolstoy called “the highest good for which that society strives” which was akin to “a flowing river. If a river flows, there is a direction in which it flows. If a society lives, there is a religious consciousness that indicates the direction in which all the people of this society more or less consciously strive.”[94] The founders of the great religions, Tolstoy believed, were like architects: “one architect makes one estimate, another makes a second, and so on. The estimates are a little different, but they are separately correct; and every one sees that, if each estimate is fulfilled, the house will be erected.[95] While the “religions differ in their external forms,” due to “geographical, ethnic and historical conditions,”[96] Tolstoy contended, they “are all the same in their basic principles.”[97]
Tolstoy’s view of the unity of religions is well captured in his short story “The Coffee-House of Surat” (1893). In the coffee house, members of different religions dispute the nature of God, including Sunni and Shia Muslims, Catholic and Protestant Christians, animists, Jews, Hindus, and Confucians. There is disagreement because each worships God in a different way from the others. Yet during the course of the conversation, God is compared to the light of the sun, and the participants begin to reach an understanding. Like God, different people see the sun differently. Some who live among mountains think it sets only over mountains they are familiar with, others believe it sets over the ocean, others who have sailed around the world understand that the sun shines on the whole world, and still others know it even shines on other planets, while those who are blind don’t see the sun and doubt it is there. The story concludes, “Each man wants to have a special God of his own, or at least a special God for his native land. Each nation wishes to confine in its own temples Him whom the world cannot contain…The higher a man’s conception of God the better will he know him…let him who sees the sun’s whole light filling the world, refrain from blaming or despising the superstitious man who in his own idol sees one ray of that same light. Let him not despise even the unbeliever who is blind and cannot see the sun at all.”[98]
Tolstoy explains that while adherents of different faiths believe different things theologically, for example, regarding miracles associated with Jesus, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and Buddha, he wanted religious people across the world to discern and “hold on to what is common” between them.[99] For example, Tolstoy noted the ubiquity of the “Golden Rule” across traditions, to do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. The Golden Rule, Tolstoy affirmed, “was expressed almost simultaneously by Confucius and Buddha and the Jewish teacher Hillel and by Jesus,”[100] as well as in the “Mahomedan…and Brahminic world.”[101] Tolstoy explained, “to the question, ‘Is it right to act towards others as you would have them act towards you? Is it good to love men, to pardon their offences and to be merciful?’ the reason of all men, at all times, answers: ‘Yes it is right, it is good.’”[102] The “eternal law of God,” he said, “is alike in all the teachings.”[103]
All religions, Tolstoy stated, come down to “the opposition between personality, the ‘I’ divorced from the whole, and the awareness of this whole (God) together with the ‘I’…in this opposition lies the whole essence and secret of life which people were aware of thousands of years ago.”[104] Religions had reached strikingly similar conclusions on seeking to bring humanity closer to God—and each other—through love. What Tolstoy described as “a unity based on love” was present “In the Christian world and in the Mahometan world close to it.”[105] Concerning Buddhism, Tolstoy asserted, “That with which man commingles, or into Which he is absorbed in Nirvana, is the same Origin that is called God in Hebraism, Christianity and Mohammedanism.”[106] Tolstoy further believed, because of the innate interconnectedness of all in God, that non-violence was also present in the world’s religions, for example through the “Golden Rule.”
In his own life and career, Tolstoy particularly reached out to the “Other” through his advocacy for justice and religious freedom. In Russia, Tolstoy witnessed extensive religious persecution, which he linked to the exercise of raw power in the modern state—the religion of the rulers of a state tends to be what is enforced on the rest of the population.[107] In this environment, Tolstoy made appeals such as “don’t despise Jew or Tatar, but love them,”[108] and he called the Jews “my brothers, whom I love.”[109]
In a letter to Tsar Nicholas II, Tolstoy asked him to “review and destroy the existing laws about persecution for religion’s sake.”[110] He also appealed to the Tsar to “Permit religious gatherings and religious preaching to all the faiths”; “Not keep the people of the different faiths from bringing up their children in the confession which they regard as the true one”; “Admit to all the schools the persons belonging to all the nationalities and religions, not excepting the Jews, who for some reason are deprived of this right”; and “Not interfere with the teachers when they carry on the instruction in those languages spoken by the children who attend school.”[111]
Following the horrific Kishinev Pogrom in 1903 perpetrated against the Jewish population in the Russian province of Bessarabia (now Moldova), Tolstoy blamed the Russian government directly, stating, “it is the Russian government that is to blame, in the first place, because it deprives the Jews of the most primitive and natural rights and makes of them a separate caste.”[112] When the Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem, whose stories were later the basis of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, asked Tolstoy to contribute to an anthology to benefit Jews affected by the pogroms, Tolstoy agreed and wrote “Esarhaddon, King of Assyria” discussed above, and two other stories. Aleichem then translated the tales into Yiddish and published them in Warsaw the following year.[113]
Finally, concerning Tolstoy and the “Other,” it is important to note his educational efforts, which were intended to raise the awareness of Russians about the wider world and impart valuable lessons about life from the world’s different religions and traditions. Tolstoy was frustrated that in his own era, men of “science” had no time for religion and instead stressed scientific “progress.” They anticipated the developments of the future, while leaving relegated to the past humanity’s great moral teachers who Tolstoy felt could provide guidance as Russians and humanity grappled with morality amid modernity.[114]
For children, his ABC Book, mentioned above, which was completed and published in the 1870s, presented pedagogical material for spiritual growth and included both Tolstoy’s own stories and those from diverse sources which imparted moral lessons.[115] Among the many stories in this work are tales of Arabic, Hindu, Greek, and Hebrew origin, those featuring locales such as China and Bukhara, and stories featuring Muslim peoples including “A Prisoner of the Caucasus” (see below), a Tolstoy original.[116]
Perhaps the most outstanding example of Tolstoy sharing the wisdom of the world’s great religious teachers and traditions is his last major work, A Calendar of Wisdom. In this book, Tolstoy presents succinct thoughts and quotes for a person to read and absorb every day of the year, both from Tolstoy himself and the great global thinkers and traditions which so enriched him. As he stated as he compiled it, “The nearer death is, the stronger I feel the obligation to say what I know, what God says through me.”[117] It was a work in which Tolstoy sought to speak directly to the reader about their own life “and about the Good Way of Life.”[118] Tolstoy was especially pleased the book would be easily understandable by ordinary people. Among the many sources in A Calendar of Wisdom are Jesus, the Bible, the Prophet of Islam and the Quran, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Talmud, the Dhammapada containing the sayings of Buddha, Maimonides, Marcus Aurelius, and proverbs and sayings from diverse cultures including India and China. Additionally, there are sources from closer to Tolstoy’s own time such as Thomas Jefferson, the wisdom of the Babists, the Persian forerunners of the Baháʼí, the Native American leader Black Hawk, the American writer and publisher Lucy A. Mallory, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
(to be continued)
[1] Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murád. Translated by Aylmer Maude. (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), pp. 3-5.
[2] Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume II: 1895-1910. Edited and translated by R. F. Christian. (London: The Athlone Press, 1985), p. 429.
[3] Akbar Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013).
[4] Harlow Robinson, “Six Centuries of Tolstoys,” The New York Times, November 6, 1983.
[5] Alan Pinch, “The historical background.” In Alan Pinch and Michael Armstrong, eds., Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy’s Educational Writings 1861-62. Translated by Alan Pinch. (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 11.
[6] Pinch, “The historical background,” p. 13.
[7] Pinch, “The historical background,” pp. 12-13.
[8] Alain Refalo cited in Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought: Christian Anarcho-Pacifist Iconoclasm Then and Now (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020), p. 7.
[9] Pinch, “The historical background,” p. 18.
[10] Linda Torresin, “Not Only a Writer, but also an Educator: Leo Tolstoy, Children, and Pedagogical Stories.” In Leo Tolstoy, Writings for Young Children. Translated and edited by Michael R. Katz. Illustrated by Jake Scott. (Boston: Cherry Orchard Books, 2025), pp. viii-ix.
[11] Torresin, “Not Only a Writer, but also an Educator,” p. xvi.
[12] Leo Tolstoy, “A Confession.” In Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Translated by Jane Kentish. (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 28.
[13] Tolstoy, “A Confession,” p. 29.
[14] Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You. Translated by Constance Garnett. (New York: Warbler Classics, 2024), p. 2.
[15] Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume II, p. 606.
[16] Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought: Christian Anarcho-Pacifist Iconoclasm Then and Now (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020), p. 61.
[17] Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought, p. 62.
[18] Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought, p. 61.
[19] Leo Tolstoy, “The Law of Love and the Law of Violence.” In Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Translated by Jane Kentish. (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 210.
[20] Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought, p. 70.
[21] Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought, p. 76.
[22] Leo Tolstoy, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Translated by Aylmer Maude. In Leo Tolstoy, Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy. Edited by Jay Parini. (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 113.
[23] Leo Tolstoy, “What is Religion and of What Does its Essence Consist?” In Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Translated by Jane Kentish. (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 100.
[24] Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, pp. 121, 203.
[25] Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 112.
[26] Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought, p. 49.
[27] See Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You.
[28] Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume II, p. 528.
[29] Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume II, p. 479.
[30] Nathan Haskell Dole, The Life of Lyof N. Tolstoï (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), p. 251.
[31] H. W. Brands, ed., The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 409.
[32] Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 133.
[33] Donald Fleming, “Nobel’s Hits and Misses,” The Atlantic, October 1966.
[34] Naboth Hedin, “Winning the Nobel Prize,” The Atlantic, October 1950.
[35] Donald Fleming, “Nobel’s Hits and Misses,” The Atlantic, October 1966; Naboth Hedin, “Winning the Nobel Prize,” The Atlantic, October 1950.
[36] “Leo Tolstoy.” In Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murád. Translated by Alymer Maude. (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), p. vii.
[37] Christoyannopoulos, Tolstoy’s Political Thought, p. 126.
[38] Jane Kentish, “Introduction.” In Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Translated by Jane Kentish. (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 9.
[39] Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, pp. 110-111.
[40] Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, p. 110.
[41] M. K. Gandhi, “An Introduction to A Letter to a Hindu.” In Leo Tolstoy, A Letter to a Hindu. Translated by Damian Westfall. (Redding, CA: Yehoshuai Press, 2025), p. 26.
[42] All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi as Told in His Own Words. Compiled and edited by Krishna Kripalani. (Paris: UNESCO, 1958), p. 175.
[43] Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, p. 127.
[44] Damian Westfall, “Preface: Tolstoy’s Spiritual Epiphany.” In Leo Tolstoy, A Letter to a Hindu. Translated by Damian Westfall. (Redding, CA: Yehoshuai Press, 2025), p. 13.
[45] Mourad Wahba, The Problematics of Enlightenment: Human Reason, North African Philosophy, and the Global South. Translated by Zeyad el Nabolsy. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2025), p. 46.
[46] Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, p. 137.
[47] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Tolstoy tribute, August 2, 1928,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts Amherst: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b046-i561
[48] Count Lev N. Tolstóy, “Thoughts on God.” In Lev N. Tolstóy, My Religion, On Life, Thoughts on God, On the Meaning of Life. Translated and edited by Leo Wiener. (Boston: Dana Estes & Company Publishers, 1904), p. 414.
[49] Tolstóy, “Thoughts on God,” p. 423.
[50] Leo Tolstoi, Bethink Yourselves! (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1904), p. 20.
[51] Tolstóy, “Thoughts on God,” p. 423.
[52] Leo Tolstoy, “What’s to Be Done.” Translated by Aylmer Maude. In Leo Tolstoy, The Russian Revolution. (Christchurch: The Free Age Press, 1907), p. 61.
[53] Count Lev N. Tolstóy, “The Commune and the World.” In Count Lev N. Tolstóy, Letters and Essays, Life, General Index, Bibliography. Translated by Leo Wiener. (Boston: Dana Estes & Company Publishers, 1904), p. 436.
[54] Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume II, p. 463.
[55] Tolstóy, “Thoughts on God,” p. 425.
[56] Tolstóy, “Thoughts on God,” p. 424.
[57] Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts. Translated by Peter Sekirin. (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 40.
[58] Tolstóy, “Thoughts on God,” p. 414.
[59] Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, p. 82.
[60] Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume II, p. 446.
[61] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Translated by Anthony Briggs. (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 1134.
[62] Tolstóy, “Thoughts on God,” p. 418.
[63] Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume II, p. 552.
[64] Tolstóy, “The Commune and the World,” p. 436.
[65] Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, p. 259.