The religious dimension of Tolstoy's life is usually associated
with his later years following his renunciation of art. In this
volume, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere demonstrates instead that Tolstoy
was preoccupied with a quest for God throughout all of his adult
life. Although renowned as the author of "War and Peace, Anna
Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilych," and other literary works, and
for his activism on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden of
Russia, Tolstoy himself was concerned primarily with achieving
personal union with God.
Tolstoy suffered from periodic bouts of depression which brought
his creative life to a standstill, and which intensified his need
to find comfort in the embrace of a personal God. At times he was
in such psychic pain he wanted to die. Yet Tolstoy felt that he
deserved to suffer, and he learned to welcome suffering in
masochistic fashion. Rancour-Laferriere locates the psychological
underpinnings of Tolstoy's suffering in a bipolar illness that led
him actively to seek suffering and self-humiliation in the Russian
tradition of "holy foolishness." With voluntary suffering, and
Jesus Christ as his model, Tolstoy advocated "nonresistance to
evil," and in his daily life he strove never to return evil actions
or words with physical or verbal resistance. On the other hand,
being bipolar, Tolstoy in some situations would drift in a manic
direction, indulging in delusions of grandeur. Indeed, the aging
Tolstoy occasionally went so far as to equate himself with God, as
can be seen from his diaries and personal correspondence.
The pantheistic world view which Tolstoy achieved at the end of
his life meant that God was within himself and within all people
and all things in the entire universe. By this time Tolstoy was
also utilizing images of a mother to represent his God. With this
essentially maternal God so conveniently available, there was
nowhere Tolstoy could be without Her. For, in the end, Tolstoy's
quest for God was a compensatory search for the mother who died
when he was barely two years old. "Tolstoy's Quest for God" is an
original and penetrating contribution to the study of one of the
world's supreme writers.
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