Leo Tolstoy

The Argument

Leo Tolstoy is the greatest novelist in any language and one of the most seriously religious writers in the Western tradition. War and Peace and Anna Karenina are, among other things, sustained theological arguments about the relationship between individual choice and providential history, between the false securities of status and the genuine securities of conscience.

His late religious crisis — in which he renounced his novels, gave away his property, became a Christian anarchist, and was eventually excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church — is one of the most dramatic intellectual and spiritual transformations in literary history. His short works from this period — The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius — are among the most powerful pieces of moral fiction in any literature. Ivan Ilyich's deathbed is the most honest portrait of what it means to face death having lived inauthentically.

For literary apologetics, Tolstoy is essential and complicated. His Christianity was heterodox — he rejected the institutional church, the sacraments, and the resurrection. But his seriousness about the Sermon on the Mount, his conviction that the simplest peasant might understand what the learned gentleman could not, and his unflinching honesty about the spiritual bankruptcy of his own class — these are not secondary to his achievement. They are its source.