| Chapter 1: | Life |
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—Tolstoy, Critique of Dogmatic Theology 45
Little detail is known of Tolstoy's conversion in 1880, which is odd given the excellent record of the rest of his life. Even the date is unclear. The year 1879 was when he stopped Orthodox attendance and 1881 was the year he chose for his renunciation of royalties from his writings. The date is hazy because Tolstoy, in My Confession, exaggerated the suddenness of the change in his views. Indeed, though Tolstoy himself was to sharply divide his life into that before his psychological and spiritual crisis of 1879 and 1880 and that after, most commentators now demur. Boris Eikhenbaum was the first to stress the recurrence of crises in Tolstoy's life and saw the crisis of this time as one among many faced by Tolstoy, and not an event that bifurcated Tolstoy's life. 46 Richard Gustafson follows Eikhenbaum and sees Tolstoy as a man of many crises, though Gustafson rightly sees the crises as moral and religious in nature, rather than literary. 47 “Tolstoy's literary works cannot be separated from his religious world view,” writes Gustafson, who for that reason sees 1880 as marking no decisive break in Tolstoy's career; indeed, he holds that the pre-1880 literary works can only be interpreted in the