How Tolstoy Grappled With God And The Terror Of Meaning
(ANALYSIS) Leo Tolstoy spent half a century avoiding arguably the most essential truth of them all: Everything comes to an end.
If that’s true, which it is, what’s the point?
He’d conquered every peak the world could name. “War and Peace” made him immortal. “Anna Karenina” made him rich. Critics worshipped him in tongues he didn’t even speak. Russian aristocrats name-dropped him like Scripture.
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But beneath the accolades sat a man haunted by a question he couldn’t write his way out of: Why live, when death makes everything vanish?
He had always been somewhat of a religious tourist. Raised Orthodox, baptized into tradition. He went through the motions because that’s what landowners did — appear pious andbehave secular. Faith was fine for peasants and poets, but not for a man who understood the human psyche. He believed in realism. He believed in the facts. And the most brutal fact of all was this: Everything Tolstoy touched, everything he built, everything he was — would vanish.
Then came the breakdown. He stopped writing. Stopped sleeping. Stopped pretending. The void swallowed him whole. He walked with a rope in his hand. Avoided hunting rifles like they might leap off the wall. He was the great realist of his generation, and all he could see was futility. He had told the world’s stories with brutal honesty. Now, he couldn’t find a reason to finish his own.
And so, in despair, Tolstoy turned to the one book he had avoided most of his life: the Gospels.
Raw, undiluted, unavoidable — the words hit him like a freight train.
The Jesus of Sunday school was gone. In his place stood a man who looked straight through him. Not a gentle shepherd, but a disruptive force. A voice that didn’t offer comfort, only challenge. A mirror held up to his pride. A hand dragging him into the light.
Tolstoy spent decades grappling with a series of issues.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”
He was starving — and now he knew it.
“Love your enemies.”
He had spent years perfecting grudges and sharpening his sense of superiority.
“Do not worry about tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was the monster that stalked his days and disrupted his sleep.
The Sermon on the Mount wasn’t inspirational. It was invasive. Every verse exposed something false in him. Every command undid a habit. Every parable yanked him away from the world he’d crafted and dared him to begin again. The Gospels didn’t coddle him. They broke him apart and left behind something solid enough to start again.
This wasn’t a theological curiosity. This was triage. Christ spoke with fire, not philosophy. A call to arms against self-pity, greed and the instinct to clutch comfort. Tolstoy entered the fray still trailing the scent of privilege. Belief marked no finish line. Instead, it lit the fuse.
The words were no longer abstract. They were instructions. Tolstoy began the humiliating work of trying to live them out. He gave his royalties away. He rejected war and the power it had promised. He traded silk for sackcloth, not for show but because nothing else made sense anymore.
He alienated his wife. Puzzled his children. Terrified his friends. The man they once toasted was now plowing fields and quoting Jesus like a a man of the cloth. The literary world mocked him, but he didn’t care. He had finally found his authetntic voice. He had finally found meaning.
However, failure came daily. Tolstoy cursed his own hypocrisy, grieved his vanity and doubted every motive. Then rose again and tried to be a better man. The struggle didn’t follow faith. In many ways, the struggle became faith-like.
“The Kingdom of God Is Within You” was his reckoning. More of an autopsy than a manifesto. A public record of a man trying to walk through the eye of a needle. Every page throbbed with anguish and urgency. How do you build a Christian life when you’ve spent most of it building a monument to yourself?
He didn’t have the answers. But he knew the direction.
His final years weren’t peaceful retreats into old age. They were daily surrenders. Spiritual trench warfare. He was trying, desperately trying, to live by the lessons that had cracked him open. When pilgrims came to Yasnaya Polyana, they expected to find a sage. They were shocked to find a man in the midst of a fight — a man who’d written classics, but still felt like an amateur in the one story that mattered.
At age 82, Tolstoy walked away from everything. Sick, disoriented and worn thin, he died in a railway station still chasing something real. That journey, that struggle still speaks to the tired, the restless and those who are done pretending.
In the end, Tolstoy didn’t find peace. He fought for it. And that may be the most honest thing he ever gave us.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.