“…now our whole life, from birth to death with all its dreams, is it not in its turn also a dream, which we take as the real life, the reality of which we do not doubt only because we do not know of the other more real life?”…..from Letters by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (September 9 [O.S. August 28] 1828 – November 20 [O.S. November 7] 1910) (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й, Russian pronunciation: [lʲɛv nʲɪkɐˈlaɪvʲɪtɕ tɐlˈstoj] listen , was a Russian writer widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina stand, in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life, at the very peak of realist fiction.
Tolstoy's further talents as essayist, dramatist and educational reformer made him the most influential member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Gandhi[1] and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The teaching of mature Tolstoy concentrated exclusively on the moral teaching of the Gospels. Tolstoy's Christian beliefs were based on the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly on the phrase "turn the other cheek", which he saw as a justification for pacifism, nonviolence and nonresistance. Of the moral teaching of Christ, the words "Resist not evil" were taken to be the principle out of which all the rest follows. He condemned the State, which he saw as sanctioning violence and corruption,[citation needed] and rejected the authority of the Church, which sanctioned the State. His condemnation of every form of compulsion authorizes many[who?] to classify Tolstoy's later teachings as Christian anarchism.
……. Wikipedia
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