You cannot travel the path until you have
become the path. -- Buddha
It's 150 years since
Leo Tolstoy put pen to paper and began writing his epic War
and Peace. While most people think of him as one of the 19th
century's greatest novelists, few are aware that he was also one of its most
radical social and political thinkers. During a long life from 1828 to 1910,
Tolstoy gradually rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic background
and embraced a startlingly unconventional worldview that shocked his peers.
Tracing his personal transformation offers some wise — and surprising — lessons
for how we should approach the art of living today.
Tolstoy was born into
the Russian nobility. His family had an estate and owned hundreds of serfs. The
early life of the young count was raucous and debauched, and he gambled away a
fortune through a reckless addiction to cards. As he acknowledged in A
Confession:
I
killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at
cards, consumed the labor of the peasants, sentenced
them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery,
adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder — there was no crime I did
not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries
considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man. So I lived for ten
years.
So how did Tolstoy
manage to wean himself off this rather racy, decadent lifestyle? And how might
his journey help us rethink our own philosophies of life?
Lesson 1: Keep an Open
Mind
One area in which
Tolstoy excelled was the ability and willingness to change his mind based on new
experiences. It was a skill he began nurturing in the 1850s when he was an army
officer. Tolstoy fought in the bloody siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean
War, a horrific experience that turned him from a regular soldier into a
pacifist. A decisive event took place in 1857, when he witnessed a public
execution by guillotine in Paris. He never forgot the severed head thumping into
the box below. It convinced him of the belief that the state and its laws were
not only brutal, but served to protect the interests of the rich and powerful.
He wrote to a friend, "The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not
only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens...Henceforth, I shall
never serve any government anywhere." Tolstoy was on his way to becoming an
anarchist. His criticisms of the tsarist regime in Russia became so vociferous
that only his literary fame saved him from imprisonment. Tolstoy would be the
first to encourage us to question the fundamental beliefs and dogmas we have
been brought up with.
Lesson 2: Practice
Empathy
Tolstoy was one of the
great empathic adventurers of the 19th century, displaying an unusual desire to
step into the shoes of people whose lives were vastly different from his own.
Following the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, and influenced by a growing
movement across Russia which extolled the virtues of the peasantry, Tolstoy not
only adopted traditional peasant dress, but worked alongside the laborers on his estate, ploughing the fields and repairing
their homes with his own hands. For a blue-blooded count, such actions were
nothing short of remarkable. Although no doubt tinged with paternalism, Tolstoy
enjoyed the company of peasants and consciously began to shun the literary and
aristocratic elite in the cities. He also founded an experimental school for
peasant children based on the libertarian and egalitarian ideas of Rousseau and Proudhon,
and even taught there himself. Unlike many of his fellow aristocrats who claimed
solidarity with rural laborers, Tolstoy believed you
could never understand the reality of their lives unless you had a taste of it
yourself.
Lesson 3: Make a
Difference
For an upper-class
literary gent, Tolstoy made a notable effort to take
practical action to alleviate other people's suffering. His dedication to the
peasantry was nowhere more evident than in his famine relief work. After the
crop failure of 1873, Tolstoy decided to stop writing Anna
Karenina for a year to organize aid for the starving, remarking to a
relative, "I cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about
imaginary ones." His friends and family thought it crazy that one of the finest
novelists in the world would put one of his works of genius on the backburner.
But Tolstoy was adamant. He did it again after the famine in 1891, and with
other members of his family spent the next two years raising money from around
the world and working in soup kitchens. Can you imagine a bestselling author
today setting aside their latest book to do humanitarian relief work for two
years?
Lesson 4: Master the
Art of Simple Living
One of Tolstoy's
greatest gifts — and also a source of torment — was his addiction to the
question of the meaning of life. He never ceased asking himself why and how he
should live, and what was the point of all his money and fame. In the late
1870s, unable to find any answers, he had a mental breakdown and was on the
verge of suicide. But after immersing himself in the German philosopher Schopenhauer,
Buddhist texts, and the Bible, he adopted a revolutionary brand of Christianity
which rejected all organized religion, including the Orthodox Church he had
grown up in, and turned toward a life of spiritual and material austerity. He
gave up drinking and smoking, and became a vegetarian. He also inspired the
creation of utopian communities for simple, self-sufficient living, where
property was held in common. These "Tolstoyan"
communities spread around the world and lead Gandhi to found an ashram in 1910
named the Tolstoy Farm.
Lesson 5: Beware Your
Contradictions
Tolstoy's new, simpler
life was not, however, without its struggles and contradictions. Apart from the
fact that he preached universal love yet was constantly fighting with his wife,
the apostle of equality was never able to fully abandon his wealth and
privileged lifestyle, and lived till old age in a grand house with servants.
When he mooted the idea of giving away his estate to the peasants, his wife and
children were furious, and he eventually backed down. But in the early 1890s he
managed, against their wishes, to relinquish copyright to a huge portion of his
literary works, in effect sacrificing a fortune. In his last years, when writers
and journalists came to pay homage to the bearded sage, they were always
surprised to find the world's most famous author chopping wood with some workers
or making his own boots. Given the privileged position in which Tolstoy started
life, his personal transformation, if not complete, still deserves our
admiration.
Lesson 6: Expand Your
Social Circle
The most essential
lesson to take from Tolstoy is to follow his lead and recognize that the best
way to challenge our assumptions and prejudices, and develop new ways of looking
at the world, is to surround ourselves with people whose views and lifestyles
differ from our own. That's why he ceased socializing in Moscow and spent so
much time with laborers on the land. In Resurrection,
Tolstoy pointed out that most people, whether they are wealthy businessmen,
powerful politicians, or common thieves, consider their beliefs and way of life
to be both admirable and ethical. "In order to keep up their view of life," he
wrote, "these people instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share
their views of life and their own place in it."
If we want to
question our beliefs and ideals, we need to follow the example of Tolstoy,
spending time with people whose values and everyday experiences contrast with
our own. Our task must be to journey beyond the perimeters of the
circle.
Be The Change:
Take a lesson from Tolstoy to transform
yourself, whether it's pausing from your work or daily routine to help somebody,
or listening to someone whose views differ from your own.
