Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

Chapter 1:

Life

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following year, he was promoted from second lieutenant to lieutenant for “outstanding bravery and courage” during the Battle of Chernaya River in August 1855. ¹⁸ Sevastopol had engendered in him a hatred of war, and he ended his distinguished military career as a pacifist. Tolstoy had taken part in three imperialist wars, two expansionary, and one defensive. He had come to see war as pointless and avoidable, a result of the squabbling of the European great powers over the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the carving up of its territory. But his pacifism did not have deep roots (the Polish uprising of 1863 prompted him to consider rejoining the army to help quell it) until it became the very core of his new way of life following his spiritual crisis of the 1870s.

My life was a stupid mean trick played on me by somebody. Although I did not recognize that “somebody” as having created me, the form of the conception that someone had played a mean, stupid trick on me by bringing me into the world was the most natural one that presented itself to me…But whether there was or was not that somebody who made fun of me, did not make it easier for me. I could not ascribe any sensible meaning to a single act, or to my whole life…Sooner or later there would come diseases and death (they had come already) to my dear ones and to me, and there would be nothing left but stench and worms. All my affairs, no matter what they might be, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself should not exist.

—Tolstoy, My Confession ¹⁹

Already discernible in Tolstoy's literature were his artistic genius and passionate engagement with the problems of living a human life. Along with Turgenev, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, he was considered one of the great masters of the Russian realist school, which excelled in depicting the many-sidedness of every human character and the complexity of the situations in which we find ourselves. Tolstoy's writing stood out