“Man gives himself to the illusion of egoism, lives for himself – and he suffers. It suffices that he begin to live for others, and the suffering becomes lighter, and there is obtained the highest good in the whole world: love of people.”

Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 to a wealthy and aristocratic family. By the age of sixteen he had abandoned the Orthodox faith of his childhood. By his own account, his youth was largely spent in the pursuit of pleasure, sensual gratification, and vain distractions. After serving as a military officer in the Crimean War and traveling abroad, he settled with his wife, Sonya, on his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana. There he set himself to the writing that would earn him fame and even greater wealth. His War and Peace and Anna Karenina were immediately acclaimed as works of genius, among the greatest novels ever written.

And yet despite his success Tolstoy was haunted by an underlying dis-ease, a yearning to find some deeper meaning to life. He was struck by a longstanding suspicion that such feeling of emptiness were unknown among the peasants. By emulating their life of poverty, work, and simple faith, he hoped to find the secret of happiness that otherwise seemed to elude the members of this privileged class.

Thus, Tolstoy publicly professed his return to the Orthodox faith. This was reflected immediately in the nature of his writing. No longer did he feel it appropriate to write “vain” novels. His future writing would serve his religious convictions. But he also became steadily embroiled in personal and public tensions and controversies, beginning in his family life. Sonya, the mother of his thirteen children, who had faithfully served as his literary assistant as well as devoted wife, found it impossible to sympathize with his religious obsessions; it seemed to her that Tolstoy was recklessly disregarding the welfare and interests of his own family.

The discord was only an intimate reflection of a struggle internal to Tolstoy himself. This struggle, to achieve a consistency between his ideals and his life, continued unabated for the rest of his days. His study of the Gospels led him increasingly to the conviction that the true essence of Christianity had become fatally encrusted by dogmatism, ritual, and subservience to secular authority. The heart of the gospel, in his opinion, was to be found in the Sermon on the Mount, with such themes as the presence of the kingdom of God within each soul, the counsel of voluntary poverty and nonresistance to evil, and the “law of love.” He attacked the Orthodox church for neglecting these principles; in return he was excommunicated in 1901.

Tolstoy turned over his estate to his children and gave away the rights to his religious writings. He dressed as a peasant and took to working several hours a day in the fields. In his work What is to Be Done? He had articulated his philosophy of bread labor, the conviction that each person should perform some physical labor to support his or her existence. Philanthropy was not enough. This was comparable, he said, to a man hitting upon an overtaxed horse who tries to lighten the beast’s burden by removing a few coins from his purse when the essential thing is to dismount.

Tolstoy wrote extensively on the philosophy of nonviolence and civil disobedience. Among his avid readers was a young Indian lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, who would become, arguably, his most effective disciple and interpreter. For himself, Tolstoy remained haunted by the notion that he was merely play-acting as a Christian.

On October 28, 1910, at the age of eighty-two, Tolstoy ran away from home, accompanied only by his family physician. In a note to Sonya he wrote, “I am doing what people of my age often do – giving up the world in order to spend my last days alone and in silence.” The strange flight to solitude did not take him far. On November 10 he fell ill while traveling by train. He stopped at Astapova and was taken to the station-master’s house. There his identity was quickly discovered. Within days a crowd of disciples, curiosity seekers, journalists, and family members had converged on this obscure town to be present near the deathbed of a great man. His last words were, “To seek, always to seek.” He died on November 20.