“Life is Beyond Time”. Leo Tolstoy Between Vital Practice and Moral Preaching

Abstract

At the turn of the 20^th century, Leo Tolstoy was considered an important ethical figure in Russia as well as in other cultural spheres. He was idolized as a moral example who preached life and work in the countryside in harmony with nature, charity, simplicity and denial of property; values that the aristocratic writer seemed to realize himself. At the same time, the public and ecclesiastic authorities of Russia feared the big influence emanating from the severe criticism and denunciations by which Tolstoy unveiled injustice, violence and hypocrisy of the Russian institutions. As the article shows, Tolstoyan ideas about love thas is realized here and now, denial of any recompense, nonviolent resistance, decease as a decline in everyday life and vital practice that is integrated in present played an important role in the intellectual circles of that time, e. g. in Bunin, Gorki, Heidegger, Gandhi, Nietzsche or Lukács. Tolstoy’s conception of life as pure present, as being “beyond” time and thus gaining felicity and eternity –an idea suggested by Saint Augustine–, impressed especially the young Wittgenstein. The article presents these ethical, religious and existential ideas as they appear in the Tolstoyan religio-theoretical writings and narrations while showing at the same time the contrary positions of Tolstoy’s thought and character on which they are built.