Tolstoy

Last night we watched the movie The Last Station:

The Last Station is a 2009 German/Russian/British biopic about Count Leo Tolstoy, based on a 1990 biographical novel of the same name by Jay Parini. It stars Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Dame Helen Mirren as his wife Sophia Tolstaya.

In the last year - 1910 - of the long life of internationally celebrated writer and philosopher Count Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), turbulence mounts as the Count's devoted and idealistic disciples, led by Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), maneuver against his more practical and family-oriented wife (Helen Mirren). The main setting is the Count's country estate of Yasnaya Polyana. The Count and Countess have a long-standing and loving marriage, but his idealistic and spiritual side (he is opposed on principle, for example, to private property) is at odds with her more down-to-earth and conventionally religious views.

Contention focuses on a new will that the "Tolstoians" are attempting to persuade the Count to authorize. It will negate all of his copyrights and put his writings into the public domain, potentially leaving his family without adequate support after his death. The maneuvering is seen through the eyes of a brand new secretary to the great man (James McAvoy) who finds himself having to mediate between the two sides. (He takes time out for an intense love affair with one of the Count's less content followers Kerry Condon).

In the end, the Count reluctantly signs the new will and leaves his wife and their home to travel to an undisclosed location where he can continue his work undisturbed. She unsuccessfully attempts suicide. During the journey, however, he sickens. The film ends with his death near the Astapovo train station where the Countess is allowed (barely) by his handlers to see him for one last time.

The movie made me curious about Tolstoy. I've tried to read War and Peace and Anna Karenina but gave up. I also knew that Tolstoy was a Christian pacifist and anarchist but I did find some interesting things about Tolstoy that I did not know:

[After] Tolstoy read Schopenhauer's ethical chapters, the Russian nobleman chose poverty and formal denial of the will:

But this very necessity of involuntary suffering (by poor people) for eternal salvation is also expressed by that utterance of the Savior (Matthew 19:24): "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Therefore those who were greatly in earnest about their eternal salvation, chose voluntary poverty when fate had denied this to them and they had been born in wealth. Thus Buddha Sakyamuni was born a prince, but voluntarily took to the mendicant's staff; and Francis of Assisi, the founder of the mendicant orders who, as a youngster at a ball, where the daughters of all the notabilities were sitting together, was asked: "Now Francis, will you not soon make your choice from these beauties?" and who replied: "I have made a far more beautiful choice!" "Whom?" "La poverta (poverty)": whereupon he abandoned every thing shortly afterwards and wandered through the land as a mendicant.

– Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, §170
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Tolstoy's Christian beliefs centered on the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the injunction to turn the other cheek, which he saw as a justification for pacifism, nonviolence and nonresistance. Various versions of "Tolstoy's Bible" have been published, indicating the passages Tolstoy most relied on, specifically, the reported words of Jesus himself. Tolstoy believed being a Christian required him to be a pacifist; the consequences of being a pacifist, and the apparently inevitable waging of war by government, made him a philosophical anarchist.

Tolstoy believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner self-perfection through following the Great Commandment of loving one's neighbor and God rather than looking outward to the Church or state for guidance. His belief in nonresistance (nonviolence) when faced by conflict is another distinct attribute of his philosophy based on Christ's teachings.
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Prince Peter Kropotkin wrote of Tolstoy in the article on anarchism in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica:

Without naming himself an anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, like his predecessors in the popular religious movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Chojecki, Denk and many others, took the anarchist position as regards the state and property rights, deducing his conclusions from the general spirit of the teachings of Jesus and from the necessary dictates of reason. With all the might of his talent he made (especially in The Kingdom of God is Within You) a powerful criticism of the church, the state and law altogether, and especially of the present property laws. He describes the state as the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force. Robbers, he says, are far less dangerous than a well-organized government. He makes a searching criticism of the prejudices which are current now concerning the benefits conferred upon men by the church, the state and the existing distribution of property, and from the teachings of Jesus he deduces the rule of non-resistance and the absolute condemnation of all wars. His religious arguments are, however, so well combined with arguments borrowed from a dispassionate observation of the present evils, that the anarchist portions of his works appeal to the religious and the non-religious reader alike.

In hundreds of essays over the last twenty years of his life, Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of the State and recommended books by Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, whilst rejecting anarchism's espousal of violent revolutionary means, writing in the 1900 essay, "On Anarchy":

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power ... There can be only one permanent revolution – a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.

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A letter Tolstoy wrote in 1908 to an Indian newspaper entitled A Letter to a Hindu resulted in intense correspondence with Mohandas Gandhi, who was in South Africa at the time and was beginning to become an activist. Reading The Kingdom of God is Within You had convinced Gandhi to abandon violence and espouse nonviolent resistance, a debt Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi would only last a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to give the name the Tolstoy Colony to his second ashram in South Africa. Besides non-violent resistance, the two men shared a common belief in the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy's essays.

The movie was filmed in Tolstoy's house which the communists turned into a museum in 1919 when Sophia Tolstoy died. I found this photo of the dining room in Tolstoy's house. He called "the parlor."