Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

What haunted Leo Tolstoy was not a horror of death or of the process of dying, but a horror at the meaninglessness of life, which the fact of death served to highlight. The length of a life seems less than the blink of an eye when viewed against the backdrop of eternity, and a life that had seemed pleasant and enjoyable suddenly became an absurdity when perceived as lived on the brink of the abyss of death. Most people disappear without a trace. Of their lives, of what they were and what they did, nothing remains. The values they stood for, the decisions that defined them, the principles they lived by; soon no more of these is left than of their achievements, their passions, their bones. Very few leave behind as much as Plato, Shakespeare, or Rembrandt, but how much of them do we have? How well do we really know them? We have life as human individuals, as distinct personalities, but the body that is the necessary but insufficient container for our being will soon be still. Death will snuff out our light, the darkness will take us, and hardly a trace will remain. For Tolstoy, in the middle of his life, terror was the apt response to the imminence of personal annihilation.

If meaning in life could be found in worldly success, then Tolstoy would have been at peace. For by the time of the death of his brother Nikolai in 1860, the thirty-two-year-old writer had already experienced the best (and worst) that life could offer. Born to wealth, comfort, and high social status in Tsarist Russia, his first eight years were a time of joy and innocence, spent on Yasnaya Polyana (“bright meadow” or “clear glade”), a forty-two-room manor house with a large park and a rich estate. His mother had brought the estate, about one hundred miles south of Moscow, to her marriage to Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy in 1822. Count Nikolai had little to bring except his elegant bearing, a famous name, and a title bestowed on Tolstoy's grandfather by Peter the Great. Countess Marya Tolstoy bore her husband four sons, Nikolai, Sergei, Dmitri, and Leo, and a daughter, Marya, before her death in 1830. Count Nikolai, who had been disappointed with the regime of Nicholas I, and, on quitting the army, had avoided government service, put his efforts into improving the estate his wife had left him.

Leo would later recall that it was at Yasnaya Polyana that his elder brother, Nikolai, had invented the game that Leo was to remember most