Leo Tolstoi's Christian Pacifism: The American Contribution
Abstract
In 1869, shortly after completing War and Peace and in seeming
reaction to an intense spiritual crisis known as "the Arzamas terror," Lev NikoJaevich Tolstoi appears to have decided to abandon the narrative fiction at which he excelled. Within a decade he had begun to produce the religious and didactic writings which were to bring him equal fame as a Christian moralist and philosopher. By 1883, when he published What I Believe (V chem moia vera?), Tolstoi was counseling absolute nonresistance to evil. In subsequent years he quarreled with the Russian Orthodox Church, rejected the state and its coercive apparatus, and became a corrosive critic of his society.
reaction to an intense spiritual crisis known as "the Arzamas terror," Lev NikoJaevich Tolstoi appears to have decided to abandon the narrative fiction at which he excelled. Within a decade he had begun to produce the religious and didactic writings which were to bring him equal fame as a Christian moralist and philosopher. By 1883, when he published What I Believe (V chem moia vera?), Tolstoi was counseling absolute nonresistance to evil. In subsequent years he quarreled with the Russian Orthodox Church, rejected the state and its coercive apparatus, and became a corrosive critic of his society.
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PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/cbp.1987.29
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