The Transformation of Leo Tolstoy

in Memphis, Tennessee. Doctor Martin Luther King, the apostle of non violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death. In Memphis, Tennessee. Doctor King revolutionized the struggle for racial justice in America through the use of non

violent resistance Negroes of the United States. Following the people of India have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation, and in the first three episodes of this season, we traveled back in time in order to trace the origins of that powerful moral force. Doctor King would not have become the champion of non violence without the influence of a black activist named Buyer Drustin. We are non violent

because injury to one is injury to all. More than any other civil rights leader, including King, Rustin was responsible for injecting peaceful protests into the Black freedom struggle. Rustin's own inspiration came from across the globe, from an Indian lawyer determined to convert his enemies into friends, and the struggle to free his homeland from the British Empire. I regard my two as a soldier, though a soldier of p Mohanas. Gandhi even that nonviolence was the key to

social change and to personal change as well. It became his mission to become a better person every day, and so he gradually worked on all his weaknesses and transformed them into strength. Gandhi's faith in the power of nonviolent resistance was inspired by another man half the world away, Leo Tolstoy. Like Gandhi, the famous novelists strived to live a simple life of virtue and to help the least fortunate in his Russian homeland to fight back against an

oppressive regime. You to go, I am to stint everything there is to know about you. No should all make up political views. Everything there is to know about you. Gandhi once called Leo Tolstoy, the greatest apostle of non violence in the present age. His admiration for the Russian thinker came from more than just an appreciation of his writings. The two men corresponded in a series of letters and exchanged ideas on non violent protests just before Tolstoy's death

in nineteen ten. Like Gandhi, Tolstoy was a larger than life figure in his home country for decades. Tolstoy was a wealthy Russian aristocrat and world famous novelist. He was the author of two of the greatest novels ever written, War in Peace and Anna Karenina. And then Tolstoy turned his back on his aristocratic life and accomplishments. He experienced a profound spiritual crisis, one followed by an equally profound awakening.

Lit everything about last Night, I supposed. Leo Tolstoy was born in his family's estate in the Russian countryside south of Moscow in eight This is Tolstoy scholar j Perini. I mean, the crucial thing about Tolstoy is he was an aristocrat. He was Count Leo Tolstoy. He inherited this vast estate he which had originally had thousands of serves on it. He would have had thirty servants in his

own house. He was from the extreme upper classes, and Tolstoy, like many other young men in his social circle, lived a privileged existence. Tolstoy biographer Rosamond Bartlett, he is very characteristic in his early life for sort of having these incredible passions that evaporate quite quickly. Um So one day he decides to do one thing, and then you know, very shortly he'll give it up and do something else. J Parini again. He traveled to Paris and spoke French,

like all Russian aristocrats did. He spent time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He was a great frequenter of whore houses and gambling joints. He was a wild man in his youth. He had endless mistresses and love affairs. Then his life took a very different term Rosamond Bartlett. Everything crystallized for him when on a whim he decided in his early twenties to travel down to the Caucasus with

his elder brother Nikolai, whom he idolized. Nikolai was an officer in the Russian Imperial Army, which was bogged down in the Crimean War in the Caucusus. Tolstoi went along for the ride, but he ended up joining his brother in the army. What he witnessed there disturbed him, and so his experience of violence was real. Um. He really was on the front lines. He watched people being riddled with bullets. He was really shell shocked by the experience

of fighting in the Crimean War. Tolstoi's encounter with war stayed with him. You could say there was a sort of foundation for the later views about lens Um, but they took a long time to mature. But certainly it was a life changing experience for him. During the war, Toulstoy also took up another activity that would prove life changing. Because he had so much time on his hands, he also started writing, and the birth of his literary career

takes place in the Caucasus. Tolstoy's first book of stories addressed the eleven month long siege of the Crimean capital of Sebastopol. It took readers behind the scenes of the Russian Army's doomed war effort. It was a devastating account of the horror and futility of war. Tolstoy continued to write after the war, including a colossal work widely considered his first masterpiece. So then, of course he'd plunged into the writing of War and Peace, which is this, you know,

this great work of genius, incredible novel. War and Peace chronicled another war, the French invasion of Russia under Napoleon in eighteen twelve. Tolstoy researched the war extensively in order to bring it to life, and he found it very difficult to know what to do with himself when he finished that. For as you can imagine, despite his new found fame, Tolstoy, now in his forties, was already beginning

to grow disillusioned with being a professional writer. He wanted to really engage with more pressing questions about the meaning of life, and you see that coming up more and more in Anna Karnina as it goes on, Tolstoy's second great masterpiece, Anna Karina, was published in several installments during the eighteen seventies. As the novel came to an end to Russia was getting involved in another war, which he found deeply depressing. Tolsta's opposition to war found its way

into the novel's final installment. By the time we get to the end of Anna Karnina, you're looking at Tolstoy's non violent um philosophy in embryonic form. Fyodor dosta Vski, another great Russian novelist and contemporary of Tolstoys, wrote a review of Anna Karnada. He called it quote flawless as a work of art, but he took issues with other aspects. Dostoevsky is critical of Tolstoy for opposing war in Anna Kara, and yet of two only Tolstoy has actually experienced war

at close hand. He is the only one who's actually served in the army. Dostoevsky never did. Tolstoy Is growing discontent was not limited to his objections to war. J Perini again, by the time he finished Anna Karenina, I think he was just very, very depressed, even suicidal. That there was a suicidal tendency in tolstoy Um. He just wanted to erase himself because he could see the pointlessness of life. But Tolstoy managed to find a way out.

The solution was a cause far greater than himself. In the late eighteen set in these, Leo Tulstoi embarked on long religious pilgrimages to find answers to his great spiritual questions. Rosamond Bartlin he was on us on a journey to discover some practical rules for life, and then he went to the Cave's Monastery in Kiev, where Christianity had started

in in Russia. Tolstoy, like most Russians, was raised to believe in the Christian doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church, the ruling religious hierarchy in the nation and one closely aligned with the Czarist regime. And rather like earlier decisions in his life, it was a very sort of sort of lightning moment. He just suddenly snapped. He suddenly just turned against it, and so he started to reevaluate all

his own moral principles. The aristocratic playboy turned acclaim novelists, now turned philosopher, Tolstoy undertook a critical examination of Christian theology.

He went through the Gospels and sort of throughout everything which he thought was was made believe, and ended up with a new Testament that was shorn of miracles, basically that just concentrated on what Jesus said, Tolstoy produced his own version of the Christian Gospels, one that he felt could serve as a practical guide for living a moral life.

The new Christianity that Tolstoi devised for himself essentially boiled down two the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew Chapter five Versus thirty eight to forty two. That is, you have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek turned to him the other Also, that is a nutshelle. Is Tolstoy's

religious philosophy. This is what's going to be at the heart of the millions of pages he will now write about this new Christian philosophy and what will influence people around the world, including of course famously Gandhi. Tolstoy spiritual journey landed horror on the principle of non violence. He came to believe that being a true Christian required one to make a commitment to pacifism. What came out of Tolstoy's new reading of the Gospels is this idea that

you cannot take up arms. If you're going to be a Christian, then you've you've got to live a Christian life to the letter. As far as he could see, the most important thing in the Gospels is really the sort of lore of of non violence. Tolstoy's newfound faith also compelled him to question his own life and lifestyle and to take on the sources of the power, privilege, and violence he saw everywhere around him. Leo Tolstoy's spiritual or birth was also driven by the circumstances of his

own life and upbringing. J Parini. Again, he looked around. He said, what is causing all of this horror in society? And he said, wait a minute, it's people like me, rich people who live on estates with a thousand servants. So the feeling of guilt riddles Tolstoi's conscience, and he feels driven. He was driven by guilt. Tolstoi felt the need to put his new found beliefs into action, to speak out against the evil and degregation he saw around.

And Tolstoy then became an activist himself again and again and again. I mean, he was endlessly trying to think of ways of alleviating the massive poverty which he saw. Tulslo was especially appalled by the squalor he witnessed in the slums of Moscow. He saw the kind of ferocity of the Czar, the repressiveness of this regime, and it was also horrified by the way the church, the Russian Orthodox Church, allied itself with the Czarist regime Rosamond Bartlett.

And so he's determined now never to shut up, and essentially that is what he does for the next thirty years, is to start shouting about the inequality of Russian society, the hypocrisy of the system. Toulslo believed that the best way to address such issues was through love and nonviolence, and as with Gandhi, this approach started at home. He is drastically changing his own lifestyle. So this means that he does not want to have anyone waiting on him. Ah.

He just like the idea of servants um. He stops smoking, he stops drinking, and he stops eating meat eventually, and he doesn't feel that he wants to have any any money um, and he certainly doesn't want to earn money from his own writings. Tolstoy also started to advocate for his new approach to life, and he said, well, we must first of all try to live simply. We must try to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we must resist evil in any way we can, and speak truth

to power wherever that's possible. Tolstoy could speak truth to power with near impunity because of his fame the Russians are and authorities knew they couldn't arrest or exile him. The public outcry would be immense. He was a person with leverage in society, He had wealth, he had lots

of people who would stand up for him. So the authorities put Tolstoy under instant surveillance and did their best to censor him, but he very quickly becomes a focus of attention for disarist secret police because it's dangerous behavior. Nothing that tossed toy rights from this point on can

be published for that same reason, because it's seen as inflammatory. Still, like Gandhi and India, managed to get his message of love and non violence out and most Russian people adored him for By the end of his life too, he had such moral authority that actually people looked up to him as the real star because they had no respect for Nicholas the Second, who was actually on the throne. When Leo Tolstoy would step out of a train in Moscow or out of a carriage, he would be mobbed

by hundreds, in fact thousands of people. That were incidents in Russia where thousands crushed in upon him just to even see him. He was almost treated like a god in Russia. Show Tolstoy next sank his energy and his moral authority into another magnum opus. His most ambitious writing project yet, Tolstoy completed The Kingdom of God Is Within You in The book's manuscript was more than thirteen thousand pages longer than War in Peace and antakarn And It

put together. Tolstoy argues in the book that the basis of authority is bodily violence. But Tolstoy also observes that the coercive authority of governments quote is so precarious that very little is needed to shake their power to pieces biographer J. Perini. Again, Here Tolstoy gives his most complete theological and ethical um summary of what it means to resist violence, but to do so in a kind of

passive way. Passive resistance to violence, and that's the book that King and and Gandhi really looked to and said, ah, here we go. This lays it all out so beautifully. Tolstoys treatise called for reorganizing society based on the Christian prescriptions to love by enemies and refrain from violence. The book was immediately banned from publication in Russia, but soon French, English and German translations found their way into circulation, and

tolstoys new gospel of non violence spread. The Kingdom of God is within you when right around the world, and it influenced people in very far flowing places. You had all kinds of people serving in armed forces reading that work and immediately resigning their commissions. And of course there was this young lawyer in South Africa Gandhi, who read it as well, and it had an absolutely electrifying impact on him. Gandhi admired Tolstoy's uncompromising search for truth, the

manner in which he lived according to his principles. Gandhi listed The Kingdom of God as one of the three most important influences in his life. And he wasn't even a Christian, but even Tolstoy had his influences, just like Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy. Up next, the thread continues with the origins of Tolstoy's paths and non violence. And for that we traveled back to the United States one and twenty five years before Martin Luther King Jr. Embarked

on the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Leo Tolstoy aspired to leave a simple life in his later years, but he was never able to fully embrace it. J Perini again, he wanted to be devoted to these high principles. He could certainly have left his family years earlier and gone off to live in a monastery um, but he didn't. He stayed, kept his title. He was Count Leo Tolstoi. He kept his estate, and the guilt continued to weigh upon him.

He was conscious of all of the ironies that were just in live, that his life was laden with these tremendous ironies, and there seemed to have been a trap. It was no way out, and so he takes off um and goes, you know, goes on the run. In the middle of a cold October night in nineteen ten, the eighty two year old writers snuck out of his house, the most famous man in Russia left on foot and

then boarded a train heading south for the Caucusus. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, he comes down with um terrible um infection, a kind of flow which led to a kind of bronchitis, which led to pneumonia. Tolstoy was forced to get off the train in a small town in the countryside. He spent the last hours of his life

preaching love and nonviolence to those around him. But you know, even in his deathbed he was, you know, reading Rousseau and quoting him and and and livering, you know, words of wisdom, and so Tolstoy was a bit of an oracle right to the very end. Thousands of people descended upon the small train station in the freezing cold. When Tolstoy finally died, there was a vast outpouring of public sentiment. I mean, it was as though the st Leo had died.

So it was an extraordinary scene. More than five thousand mourners waited in line to file past his coffin when it was returned to his home. The death of Tolstoy was reported on the front pages of not just the Russian newspapers, but the New York Times was running daily reports. I mean, this was the whole world was watching schools, factories, and offices closed across Russia in honor of the fallen

giant Rosamond Bartlett. Again, by the time Tolstoy died, he really was not only the most famous person in Russia, but one of the most famous people in the world. These days we just think of Tolstoy as the author of Warm Peace and Anna Karenina. Principally, during his lifetime he was much better known as a thinker, uh and as this sort of spiritual leader. J Perini, Well, I think it's just important to see Tolstoy as a primary voice in this great tradition of passive resistance to violence.

Tolstoy understood that it's never a good thing to kill people, and it's certainly a very bad thing when states organize

themselves around violence. Tolstoy's ability to think systematically and to synthesize various schools of thought helped transform the concept of nonviolent resistance, and he was able to modify and extend these ideas of non violence and put them into his own forms of expression, which then were picked up beautifully by others such as Gandhi, Martin, Luther, King, uhs Are Chevez, and so many people down the road. Tolsloy was also careful to point out that he was not the originator

of the idea. Tolstoy did not and would never have claimed to have invented uh the theories of the idea of non violent resistance to evil um. In fact, he very explicitly said, I took it from the Quakers. I took it from earlier writers. Quaker philosophers such as the Englishman Jonathan Diamond had written a great deal about the incompatibility of war and Christianity. Tolsloy was also familiar with the American Henry David Thurreau's philosophy of civil disobedience, which

proposed a radically new form of social protest. But there was one particular Quaker and American whose works and passion Tolstoy revered above all others, William Lloyd Garrison. Tolsloy started to publish his religious writings in the second half of his life, and then he began to receive responses from readers all over the world. One of his admirers was an American Wendell Garrison, who edited a journal called Non Resistance.

Garrison told Tolstoy that his father, the famous white American abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison, had a similar spiritual transformation decades earlier. The younger Garrison sent Tolstoy a copy of his late father's biography and writings. Tolstoy was moved by the elder Garrison's views and how the fiery journalist turned his principles of Christian pacifism into a plan of non violent resistance for the purposes of opposing slavery in

the U. S j Poine. Lloyd Garrison was tremendously influential in Tolstoy's mind because he was a flashy journalist who was able to commandeer ideas to his side. He was able to really get in there and nitty gritty and really create an abolitionist movement. Tolstoy devoured Garrison's writings, which included the world's first declaration of non violent resistance. Garrison drew that up nearly half a century earlier for a

peace convention in Boston in eighteen thirty eight. The declaration explained by Garrison and his fellow pacifists would oppose wars, unjust laws, and evil. Through non violent resistance and moral persuasion, we expect to prevail, Garrison wrote in the Declaration. Through the foolishness of preaching, Count Tolstoy found a kindred spirit in Boston. He even hung a framed photo of Garrison on the wall in his office. Here's Tolsloy biographer Rosamond Bartlett.

He wasn't really inclined to cooperate with any kind of of government. He didn't want to really have to deal at all with coercion at any level. And this is really the sort of heart of the idea of non violence and what so inspired him about William Lloyd Garrison too. Tolsloyd paid tribute to Garrison in the Kingdom of God. He said that Garrison's work convinced him that justice and peace could only be achieved in the world by putting the spiritual doctrine of non resistance to evil into act

of practice. The fact that Garrison was such um an activist appeal to Tolstoy as well. Still, Tolstoy could not believe that Garrison's powerful views remained relatively unknown to the world. And largely forgotten in America. So in the Kingdom of God, Tolstoy set out to republicize and build upon the American journalists long forgotten insights. A powerful idea was resurrected next

time on the thread. William Lloyd Garrison, the American who influenced Tolstoy, was a man on a remarkable mission, But the activist who sought to end his nation's original sin through non violent means would live to see it instead resolved through the bloodiest violence in American history. Old folks get chill with things and Boston bad peace, sad gosh, you with things impossibly lord and under running now by Gail style. He speaks to make She draws a bread

and whispers my name. I'm exactly the same as a Russian count in a ten twenty three, and he's exactly like me, exactly like me.