Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

ignorance; some simply did not see that human life was a meaningless absurdity. The second was the Epicurean path of seeking distraction, to see the hopelessness and meaningless of human existence, but nonetheless to seek to enjoy what good there is in it while it lasts. The third was suicide, to comprehend the stupidity of the joke which has been played upon one and then to have the strength of character to put an end to the joke, to destroy the absurdity that is one's life. The fourth way was weakness, to be fully aware of the meaningless of life and yet to continue to drag it out until at last it is taken from one. ³⁷ Attracted to the philosophic pessimism of Schopenhauer, Tolstoy tried to adopt the thesis of the meaningless of life to which his reason pointed. “Life is that which should not be—an evil and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life,” he wrote to a friend in 1869. ³⁸ But the position he tried to adopt haunted him, quite literally, when from 1874 he began to have his “moments of perplexity and arrest of life.” ³⁹ He recorded one in fictionalized form, describing how he fell asleep but awoke in torment: