Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

The 19th Century
Presentation 13 of 13

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
The Master Spirit of the 19th Century.
Transformations Back to Spiritual Man.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 28, 1984

Transcript:

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The date is February 28, 1984. This is the last lecture to thirds of lectures by Roger, where on the 19th century, tonight's lecture is on Tolstoy who lived 1828 to 1910, the master spirit of the 19th century transformations back to spiritual man point, repeating as it does all coercive government. I naturally cannot acquiesce with the position of president of the Republic. Such functions exist. It is obviously best that they should be occupied by individuals worthy of confidence. Mr. Bryan, I greatly respect and sympathize with and know that the basis of his activity as Kendrick to mine and his sympathy with the interest of the working masses, his anti-military ism and his recognition of the fallacies produced by capitalism. I do not know, but hope Mr. Bryan will stand for land reform according to the single tax system of Henry George, which I regard as being at the present time of the most insistent necessity and which every progressive reformers should place to the fore.
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William Jennings, Bryan had visited yes' Neha Pollyanna sometime before, and they'd got along very well. And of course, uh, Mr. Bryan's granddaughter's in the audience. So I thought I'd just get to that before we got any further along Tolstoy has my grandfather, to me, literarily, Tolstoy and Yates, or my antecedents in the West. Tolstoy is also the master spirit of the 19th century. He is also formative in that he carries this lecture series into the 20th century for the first time we've been working for four years, twice a week to try and trace an outline and a single voice with a single mind, some idea of how we got to where we are. And we now approach for the first time, the 20th century, this is a watershed. It will take, uh, the rest of the year to catch up in the philosophic research society lectures, to the point that we reached tonight here, the theories they're dealing with the age of Serantes in Shakespeare, that first revolution of personality, which broached the modern mind will end at the end of March.
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And then April, may and June will be the age of revolution, chalet and Beethoven Garten Hagle. Then from June, July and August, this summer, July, August, September, I guess it is we'll the lead into the 20th century where we take a Schopenhauer and Nate Shan, Epson, Strindberg, uh, checkoff the, uh, Cezanne house, those individuals that led into the 20th century. So that by September of this year, we should finally be in position to have the early 20th century, the last quarter of this year, which will probably start with Einstein. And, um, so we'll finish up this year into the 20th century and it'll take us probably some time to digest the quality of the century, probably the first half of 1985. Um, the reason for all this is that we cannot think about our situation today without a context, we were okay, given either no context or too many contacts for our own good.
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And those of us who have come into maturity second since the second world war have been at a distinct disadvantage from all other times, we have not understood what a viable tradition really was, except if we learned it in one or more disciplines or in a profession or from a family tradition, but generally the civilization, which should, uh, sustain the personality has progressively, uh, unrivaled to the extent to where today in the mid 1980s, that can't sustain personality at all. Uh, the only way that anyone could ever hone themselves into a viable human being is to withdraw from the society. So to reinstate this somewhat, that is to say, to reinstate the context within which one could actually come to terms with oneself. We've been doing this whole series. The Tuesday night series of course moves to Hyperion, to whirling rainbow. And what we're doing there starting next Tuesday night is we're beginning a new kind of a movement.
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These courses, these presentations, these lecture series, however you like to call them have been moving in quarters three months at a time. Now we're going to take a broad swath of six months at a time to try and make the tone of a, uh, a broad, uh, cultural APAC. We're going to take, uh, Christianity, which was formed roughly in the thousand years from 300 ADA to 1,380 after Christianity was formed, after it was made into a, a viable religion, it was then used by power groups for their own ends. There has been no real Christianity since the 13th century. There has only been organizations which have used that banner for their own self-aggrandizement from time to time, there have been Westerners who have been real Christians, and they have always excerpted themselves from the churches of the time. Our man tonight Tolstoy as a case in point, we'll see that Tolstoy at the peak of world fame, as the moral leader of Western civilization will be ex-communicated by the Greek Orthodox church.
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And his wife will write a letter to that patriarch of the Greek Orthodox church and say, do you think that I will let my husband be buried without the proper ceremonies? Do you think I will not find some priest who is really a Christian who will perform them or some bad priest who isn't a Christian who will do it for pay Kierkegaard, another individual who said it's very difficult to be a Christian because the whole civilization is against that yet. Yeah. Was geared like shark's teeth, not to let you be come individuated in that mode. So we're going to Tuesday night, try to bring into shape the mystical entity that can be described and known as Christianity after that a series, which will end in August we'll then do a second six months series, which will take Alexandria the thousand years of Western civilization that was made in Alexandra because Christianity is the child of Alexandria.
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Christianity is not the child of the old Testament is the child of Hellenistic civilization. And it is a gross misunderstanding to think that the new Testament follows the old Testament. Christianity is a product, a child of the Hellenistic civilization that preceded it. And when we understand that, then we understand why the rejection of the ancient Greco Roman world was necessary for the birth of Christianity and why the rejection of Christianity led to the esoteric rebirth of the ancient world and the occult from medic traditions that came up in the 13th century. They began to combat then sometime in 1980 5,000. And I will do a six month course called Greek Buddhism will show that there was a world civilization from 100 BC to about 300 Ady and that all peoples participated in the Chinese, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, everybody, and that there were even Emissary sent to the new world, to those ancestors of the Mayans, to those total tax, to those, uh, last survivors of the Omex, the American Indians recorded. So that won't take then the world civilization that was dismembered in the third century D for the same reason that most civilizations have been dismembered because power groups have sought to aggrandize their own position with the working dynamics and core of the organization set up. So we have a big game in mind, and it doesn't really matter whether there are many people in the tenants or not. I have a favorite, a Dharma teacher in Los Angeles. Who's been teaching here for 56 years.
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He has about nine or 10 people come to hear him after all that time. But anybody who knows anything knows that he is the carrier of a lineage, which is still intact. And he's the number one, man. So it's not incumbent upon populations or popularity for significance. But the reason that this has done is to air a little bit of the laundry that needs airing. As I said once before, I wish somebody else had done it. But when I got to be in my forties and saw that nobody else had done it, I had to shoulder it myself. Tolstoy is a descendant
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On both sides from the oldest families in Russia. Tolstoy is the embodiment, the epitome of the Russian person, the Russian psyche early in the Russian career, more than a thousand years ago, they, Norman invasions had produced a interlocking directorate of Royal houses in Europe, so that the descendants of the Norman Kings ruled Russia and Ireland and France and Sicily. And so there was a very interesting circle of Norman descended, uh, Kings in Royal families. And, uh, Russia Rubrik was R U R I K was the first ruler of this line and the descendants of Rurik number a, uh, a bunch of Royal families in the Russian tradition. One of which was the full Khan skis. And Tolstoy's mother was a Bolkonsky Tolstoy's grandfather. Well, Konski became the model for one of the major figures in war and peace Tolstoy himself is uninteresting person age. He was born in 1828. The date always given is August 28th, but actually this is the old style Russian calendar and transpose to our modern calendar. That would be about the 10th of September was about 12 days it's difference, which makes him a for go for those who think in those terms. Yes, Tolstoy held a very poignant, um, psyche.
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That is to say, since I'm acquainted with that, uh, phenomenon myself, I can describe it somewhat, uh, accurately, whenever he experienced something as a baby, it was if we can use the term total listing, that is to say the experience carried with it. The whole tone of observation, if as if someone had been already a master Yogi, whether this bodes for reincarnation or not is another issue, but Tolstoy's first recollections, which he wrote down and what she said, he could not verify the exact order, but that the recollections were pristine and here are some of them. He says, I lie bound and wish to stretch out my arms, but cannot, I scream and cry. And my screams are disagreeable to myself, but I cannot stop someone. I do not remember who bends over me. This all happens in semi-darkness. I only know there were two people there.
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My cries affect them. They are agitated by my screams, but do not on time. Me as I want them to. And I scream still louder to them. It seems necessary that I should be bound, but I know it is unnecessary. And I wish to prove this to them. And I, again, burst into cries, which are unpleasant to myself, but are yet unrestrained. I feel the injustice and cruelty, not of people for, they pity me, but a fate. And I pity myself. I do not know and shall never know what it was all about. Whether I was swaddled while still a baby at the breast and struggled to free my hands Russian at this time, the new ones were often, um, wrapped with linen. They looked almost like little mommies to preserve them. Uh, infant mortality rate has always been a human problem until just the century in countries like the United States.
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We have lost sight of the fact that infant mortality was a, a real, no problem. Um, the 1983 world census showed that in Africa, 94 of every thousand babies die in black Africa, which means a 10% infant mortality rate. Almost all of the world was like this at one time. Well, if your chances are one in 10 of dying as, as an infant, as a baby, uh, the concern is, is to protect that child right away when they've come out. The Russian way was to, um, wobbled them almost like little mummies, tightly wound. Okay. Then that's one memory. The next impression I am sitting in a tub and I'm surrounded by a new and not unpleasant smell of something with which they are rubbing my tiny body, probably it was brand put into the water of my bath. The novelty of the sensation caused by the brand aroused me.
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And for the first time I became aware of and liked my own little body with the visible ribs on my breast and the smooth dark wooden tub, the Baird arms of my nurse, the warm steaming, swirling water, the noise it made, and especially the smooth feel of the wet rim of the tub as I passed my hands along it so that the experience happens rather like when one strikes a match in the darkness and the flame comes up and you see all, but it's only a glimpse, but the glimpse is not fragmentary. It's total. It's simply that the duration is like a media or like a, uh, a match being lit. And then it goes out. But the connection, the web of relationality is all intact and all there. What remains later on are they sensate levels of connections because the neurocircuitry of an infant is actually unconnected to the brain at this time.
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And all that remains is the impress memory of the sensate occurrence. They meditative, I, of course not being a part either of the neurocircuitry or of the brain remains, um, present and intact. And so when recalling this, there's a flavor along with the sensate material, the information, and this is what Tolstoy is in effect, demonstrating that he was capable of recalling as a baby. He recalls being in a bed. He says, I am in bed and feel well and happy as usual. And I should not remember it, but that suddenly the nurse or some, one of those who made up my life does something in a voice new to me, and then goes away. In addition to being happy, I am also frightened. And besides me, there was someone else like me. He had a little baby sister, Mary, who was about a year, little over a year younger than he, so that both of them probably were in this crib out.
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And someone was playing a little game with them. And the game was the Russian version of the boogeyman. It's going to get you. So you better be good little kids. And they remember the joy of the contact and also the joy of the fright, because it was a fictive fright and they were companions and he remembers this and he remembers that they and I hide in my pillow, hide and glance at the door from behind which I expect something new and Mary, we laugh and hide and wait. And then someone appears in a dress and cap quite unknown to me, but I recognize that it is the same person who was always with us. So these are the earliest memories of toll store, and they give us an indication of the enormous quality to this person who was entering into the life known as Leo Tolstoy, the family home.
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Yes, Nia Pollyanna means a bright Glade was the largest state, many hundreds of acres, about 700 surfs. All of it, fenced, all of it walled with, uh, lanes leading up to the main house that were, uh, rimmed with the lime trees originally. And then, uh, Tolstoy planted Oaks, which are still there. I was going to bring tonight. I a beautiful painting by the Russian artist rep pen of a Tolstoy reading, leaning against one of his Oaks with his book. And one of his visits to Yesenia poliano you have to get a, you have to Shanko said that he had a, in San Francisco, he said he had the odd experiences. He walked down this lane, saunter down this lane that they roots of the trees, which were sticking up above ground and going down, we're almost like the fingers and the hands of tall start holding the earth together, that it was just an eerie sensation. And when he thought about it, it was not there. It was not true. But when he didn't think about it, the feeling was haunting and constantly there. And he said, when he left you as Neha Pollyanna, he, he felt that someone was waving goodbye, um, and feeling tone that there was a presence there. Quality there, bright Glade.
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Yes. Neha Poliana. The children were educated there. They were given a very good education. Tutors were brought there, his first, um, major tutor, their theater or a cell, uh, figures later on in, um, the first published work by Tolstoy called childhood. And he becomes a Carl mower. He learned German and French and English. Tolstoy was very adept at languages. He learned a Hebrew. He was not so good in Latin. He learned a little Italian later on in his life. He surprised everyone by learning classical Greek in three months. And people doubted that he could have done this. And a, uh, uh, professor of classics in Moscow sought to test, uh, Tolstoy and thrust in front of him. A copy of Santa fawn in Greek, and a toll started Reddit straight up. And then they argued for several hours over the interpretation of his NFR. And finally, the professor realized that Tolstoy was arguing in classical Greek. He was an extraordinary mind. And I think we have to keep in mind that as one moves up in levels of intelligence, one, doesn't just arithmetically add capacities. They multiply so that there's a geometric increase in perspective. So that at certain plateaus intelligence jumps, quantum leap and capacity one can do this through discipline and meditation. There are stages in a high meditation where one realizes that the whole context that one was working with is just about a thesis within an even larger context. It's not quite like a heat Galean universe, but it's interestingly parallel.
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So that Tolstoy as an individual that we're dealing with is one of the really great minds of human history. He had not only as a better writer than Dostoevsky, but he guess centuries ahead of him in terms of human understanding. So these tutors that were brought for the children, there were four Tolstoy boys and the sister, Mary, who was the youngest Lidl, and his name actually should be Tolstoy. The emphasis should be on the second soul. I'll start. And it's not an I, the I T O L S T O Y comes from the French translation from the Russian, uh, the why is correct. There were four brothers and Leo was the youngest because oldest brother was about five and a half years older. Then the next one was two years older. The next one, one year older, the oldest one, Nico Linea, as he used to call him was the favorite. He was the model that [inaudible] all through his life was a extraordinarily kind individual did not take to writing because he did not even have that fault, which writers named above all vanity the need to be published, the need to be read.
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In fact, when Tolstoy's, uh, first works were coming out and they were unsigned [inaudible], who was a friend of Tolstoy's sister, Mary living in the same, uh, part of, uh, Russia Turgenev was reading out loud, some incidents from the work. And Mary knew that it had to be one of her brothers and she thought it was nickel Linea rather than layer Dimitri. The next son was quite a fine individual
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Surrogates, the closest to Leo West, the mischievous boy, the one who always got into trouble, the one who went to the, uh, gypsy girls first, and he lived longest. He lived until 1904, the other two brothers would die before they got to middle age. Leo himself would live until 1910, which gave him a very, very long life. He was, um, quite interesting. They home, yes, Neha Pollyanna filled with visitors all the time, for some reason or other, a lot of monks and half mad pilgrims. Um, God intoxicated people would come to Yesenia podium and be put up in the Russian tradition in the Greek Orthodox tradition coming from the old great mystery school tradition. There are people who is experienced with divinity, uh, leads them off. The deep end they are of course, welcomed into one's home. Just as the old tradition used to be in more ancient etiquettes of understanding to always set another place for dinner. In case one of these kinds of roving people, one of these hobos for God came by one could offer this place for them. We of course today with our Safeway lines and NBC news minds, uh, hardly believed that this could be so, but generally human nature is such that there are usually about, uh, a 10th of a percent of the population who are, uh, uh, kindly mad and rooms should be made for them. Almost every civilization has always made room for
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Them.
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By the summer of 1840 Russia experienced a great famine.
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It was not as great. A feminist would happen 50 years later, but at this time, the young, uh, Leo Tolstoy just 12 years old was an onlooker and the family had to leave the estate. And in fact, his mother who had died very, uh, when he was very young, probably less than two years old, his father had passed on and he had been given into charge of an aunt. And when she passed on, just after the famine was over, the whole Tolstoy family was moved into the interior of Russia to cousin cause on his, on the Volga river, I don't know how well you can think of geography, Moscow, uh, position Moscow in your imagination. Draw a line straight to the, uh, East towards, uh, uh, the Euro mountains. After about three or 400 miles. The first large city you get to is Gorky, which is on the Volga. And then the vulgar runs almost due East and where it begins to make a huge turn to the South. That's where Cazan is probably eight or 900 miles from Moscow. The vulgar then goes almost due South, eventually emptying into the Caspian sea at Austra con uh, quite a long ways down. That's roughly the, the geography so that the Tolstoy family was moved to cousin and the boys were into the university there. Our cousin Tolstoy never, uh, seemed to have to study.
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Whenever exams were coming up, he would take a week and read all the works and paths. They graded you one through five and often toast. I would get five plus in geography. He got one because he had never been curious, no one had ever told him about things. And the next time he took the exam, he got a five. He just simply would fill in what he needed, but Tulsa, his problem was never intelligence. Tolstoy's problem was always character. The bone that he had to chew on given him was the development of character. And this is why Tolstoy becomes one of the great ethical writers of the world. He is on a par with Play-Doh. The reason is, is that he had to grind out every realization, scratch out every understanding inch by inch, in his own life. It was never easy for him to be moral.
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It was never easy for him to understand why one had to do it this way because great intelligence often as fast style, it's a plate does not recognize rules or boundaries as categorical, uh, necessities from 1841 to 1847. They lived in Cazan and at the age of 19, without taking a degree, Leo Tolstoy left and he had in fact, uh, created quite a stir for himself. He had originally gone into Oriental languages, and then it had an argument with the, uh, head professor of Oriental languages. And, uh, he knew that he wasn't going to get his degree from this man. So he shifted over to law and he decided that he just didn't even want to bother with a degree what Dr. Yasnaya Polyana for a few months to recover, he would have this pattern all through his life. I'm going to have to skip a lot of that, but just imagine that the punctuation of most of his life was returning back to bright Glade and, uh, getting back into the land, getting back into the trees, sunlight, the shadow, the great house.
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And you have to imagine a huge estate. Now it had 700 serves thousands of acres. Then he went to St. Petersburg. He was going to take a quickie degree in St. Petersburg, which he got, but all the time he was living the dissipated life of the young aristocrat gambling womanizing. If we can use that term, one could not address oneself to the women of one's own class. So one went to the gypsy girls, this, uh, led of course, to drinking and partying, which coupled with the gambling led to a total dissipation Tolstoy later in his life could hardly believe the kind of life that he had been capable of. And, uh, he lamented most, uh, uh, profoundly, uh, when we get to the confession that he wrote in 1879, uh, he almost, uh, threw himself away in terms of moral judgment had said that I was so bad that it's almost impossible for someone like me to resuscitate themselves.
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This will, of course come up a few years after that. You haven't, compulsion's towards suicide. We'll get to that by the time that he finished his work and Petersburg, and came back again to as Poliana another characteristic of Tolstoy, he began to make lists of what he must do. He loved to sit down and make less to revise his whole life. Here are some rules that he set himself at this time. One to fulfill what I set myself, despite all obstacles to, to fulfill well, what I do undertake three, never to refer to a book for what I had forgotten, but always tried to recall it, to mind myself floor, always to make my mind work with its utmost power five, always to read and think aloud in classical times. Uh, one read a loud. The reason for this is that [inaudible], uh, [inaudible] and diction are related.
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If you learn something to declaim it out loud, you really learn it. Whereas if you learn it, um, silently, the composition is done, um, graphically and that fades very quickly, unless your mind is trained to recall a graphic, uh, uh, set up the audio is much easier for, for the mind to work in six, not to be ashamed of telling people who interrupt me, but they are hindering me letting them first feel it. But if they do not understand telling them with an apology, now these are all rules for some bright young man who's leaning on his mind. These are rules for the reform of life. Using the mind as the master of the situation, almost making the mind a tyrant.
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He decided that he would spend two years at y'all's nail Pollyanna, and he would fill in all of the studying that he had not gotten to. So he drew up a list for that. He decided to study the whole course of law to study all of medicine and its theory to perfect French, Russian, German, English, Italian, and Latin to study agriculture, both theoretically and practically to study all of history, geography, and statistics, to study mathematics, to write his university thesis, to reach the highest perfection I can and music and painting nine. Very interesting to write down rules for my conduct to acquire some knowledge of the natural sciences and to write essays on all the subjects. I studied two years,
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No,
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A precocious giant having no sense that there are bounds or limitations. What are bounds and limitations to such a man. He spent the time at Yesenia Pollyanna. In fact, beginning to work with educating the surfs, the surf children, he in 1849 at the age of 21 while educating himself began to realize almost like a, uh, an intelligent mind will always pick up the, the recursive, uh, penumbras of an activity that is to say you all, you will notice what, uh, why other people are not doing what you're doing and what bad effect it's having on them. And so you wanted to extend what you're doing to include them. So in 1849, he made his first attempt at education. Tolstoy. Incidentally is a very great educator, very important. Uh, he was as important as Russell or Dewey in education. In fact, he is the link between resell and jewelry in education.
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He attempted to educate the serve children. And for two years, he worked at it. And then in 1851, actually in the winter of 1850 1851, he spent his time in Moscow, probably for the concert season, that sort of thing, the party season. And he piled up an enormous gambling debt more than 4,000 Rupin rubles, which was an enormous debt. Um, one could have lived very comfortably on 500 rubles a year in order to please this condition breaking himself of this habit. He decided to join his brother who was going off to enroll himself in the military at the furthest Southern reaches of Russia in the Caucasian mountains. And so Tolstoy as these blessings usually will have, it was seized by circumstance and carried by this bless its circumstances in the, uh, uh, clause of the great bird of mother nature's freedom from Moscow down to the Caucasian mountains and drop into the situation there.
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In the 1850s, the Russians were trying to consolidate their empire. They have always been after consolidating their empire. And at this point it was reaching into the Caucasian mountains. And in order to secure the Caucasian mountains, they realized that you would have to go over the mountains and secure the other side so that the whole of the Caucasian range was brought into Russia. That areas known as Georgia used to be known as Georgia, the major city. In fact, strategically, it was on the Southern side of the Caucasian mountains. Uh, it's called today to build a sea. It used to be called TIF plus, and it will be in Titlis that throws drywall, right? His first work on the very Northern edges of Armenia, a mountain range away from Russia breathing the fresh air of freedom at 24 Telstar. Well recall his childhood because he was put into a situation where the freshness of the circumstances, the madly forthrightness of life and death as a daily happening among the troops and the raids and the Cossacks and so forth, uh, suited toaster wise, intelligence and openness of character. The Russian so is happy when it is forthright. When deviousness has called for the Russian Sadiki seeks to defend itself by labyrinth.
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When the Russian psyche is free to explore and express itself, it becomes lost because those labyrinths are made for itself. If any of these tapes get to the Pentagon, the best defense against the Soviet union is to give them a lot
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Ground
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By giving them some kind of a ring defense border. It just strengthens their position, the battle of Leningrad
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Case in point, and as we'll see the battle of Sevastopol and the Crimean war, and even more ecstatic case in point w and told story was there. He wrote childhood 1854. He had been in the Caucasian mountains for about three years. At that time, the material that he gained there would come out in such works as the raid or the Cossacks Hajime Gerrard late in his life. These pictures of free individuals, the men and the women were equal. Both sexes could ride or shoot or have whatever kind of living situation they wanted after marriage. The women generally ran the families and the men generally round the bringing in of, of goods to the household. But before marriage, men and women were equal equal stature, there was no double standard in the Caucasian mountains. The Cossacks in fact, talk Tolstoy, the genuine in simplicity that a culpability accrues from man in complexity, so that if one simply sets oneself to, uh, hone down the complexities, one will come closer and closer to an openness of character. This would be one of the touchstones for, um, uh, for toll store. He in fact, um, Wrote his first word childhood into lists and then where to get it published. Well, he chose a periodical called and translation to contemporary. The editor at this time was the poet Nacra off. It had been founded by Pushkin in St. Petersburg some 10 or so years before and published childhood with just the initials, L N
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T
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Neck Rusof wrote to total story and said, it's not practice to pay new writers for their first word and toaster. I noticed in his diary, lots of praise and no check
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That Christophe a couple of weeks later wrote to Telstra and said, you know, I have read your story again. And it really is well written. In fact, when childhood came out, it caused a minor sensation. Russian literature was just getting off the ground. Pushkin who had been the first really great native writer had shown the world that Russians could be European Turgenev, who was about 10 years older than Tolstoy was the first international Russian writer. And it was just getting started. In fact, it was Turkey Pena who picked up a copy of, uh, the contemporary to gain. You have lived halfway between Gorky and cousin, just South of the, uh, uh, in [inaudible] just South of the Volcker river. He began raving about this new young writer and he was at Tolstoy's sister's house with her husband, and he was reading passages out loud. And that's when Mary knew that there was somebody in her family, because these were stories that she knew. The second story that he wrote was called the raid. And for that he was paid,
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Then he began sending more and more stories. And it seems, uh, I don't, I don't have a complete listing, uh, available just right off the cuff, but he began to write, um, a prob probably every three or four months a story. So that by 1853, 1854 Tolstoy was launching himself on the literary career. It never occurred to him. He was in fact, very comfortable in the army, but he wished to be withdrawn from the Crimea. The reason is that that he had fallen in love with a Cossacks girl, and she had sized him up in relation to contact values, and he would not go horse rating for her. Uh, he was not really the kind of daring devil that she really wanted. So she was somewhat indifferent to him.
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Tolstoy had made, uh, several friends among the cos act men. There was, uh, one individual who, uh, uh, taught him a lot about Cossacks values. I believe his name was [inaudible] who had, uh, uh, taught Tolstoy that when you make an exchange and become friends, you are friends for life and friends will offer their life for you. It's just simply that a life has no value other than just to be offered for a friend. This was a religious insight for Tolstoy later on that one would offer one's life for another became the central value, which is achieved by simplicity of design and openness with purpose that without simplicity of design or openness of purpose, one could not understand the beauty and the joy of sacrificing oneself for another, that this quality of sacrificial love was in fact, the poignant fundamental value in Christianity, which was obscured and covered up by the organization of Christianity into the various churches. It was the one value that they could not admit, or they would have to sacrifice themselves for the congregation.
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After the raid was published. His second story wrote, uh, in quick succession memoirs of a billiard marker. And then he received, uh, a long expected order for him to take an officer's exam, which he of course passed. It was just a formality. And so Tolstoy became a young aristocrat, um, uh, junior officer, he left the car occasion mountains, went back into central Russia back to Moscow. And just about this time as he was going back, he participated in one of the worst snow storms of the century. And out of this, he wrote a very interesting short story called the snow storm, rather like just a Conrad's work, uh, typhoon, which creates the natural conditions we're in man, regardless of his ingenuity and courage is out distanced by nature's power and learns that there are finally limitations to his mobility and purpose because nature can outdo him in its capacity to envelop him. So if you get a chance to snowstorm, it's very, very interesting Tolstoy later on in his life, dismissed it as a minor work, but it's actually quite an interesting about this time. The Crimean war came to a head, the anguish, Turks, the French, everybody wanted to get into the act Tolstoy as a young aristocratic. Now, officer an aide to count for a general went down to the Crimea. He went to Bucharest, initially took stock of the situation,
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Volunteered for the intense fighting in the Crimea was sent to Sevastopol. Now Sebastopol at this time was beginning to be surrounded by a severe, uh, force probably on the order of 20 to one with, uh, sophisticated, uh, artillery and guns. And in fact, they rushed in general in charge of the defense's Sebastopol had withdrawn. His army had given the city up, but there were a number of Russian sailors in town, and there were still some troops left and some ingenious engineer who talked the population into resisting. And so they began building a series of trenches, interlocking, labyrinthian trenches surrounding Sebastopol on the South side. So basketball was cut in half by an estuary that comes in from the sea of Esau, uh, the black sea, uh, that area. And, uh, North Sebastopol at that time had just one large Fort fortress. And the city was South of this estuary, probably a hundred yards across something like that. 200 yards, maybe
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[inaudible]
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The South ramparts of Sebastopol then were honeycombed by this ingenious engineer and the population of Sebastopol, which wasn't that large, but they had set up enough ramparts and it positioned somehow enough Canon and so forth to repulse the attack and make it almost impossible for them to be, uh, conquered. So they sent a message to the czar, the SAR at this time, Nicholas, the second, it was a real tyrant was filled with consternation that the general should have withdrawn. So he ordered reinforcements to go to Sebastopol. And Tolstoy was one of those young officers who went there, Tolstoy recounts in three parts of a great short novel called Sebastopol, the defense of that, um, city, the heroism of the average Russian person in contradistinction to the rather dissipated in morality or a morality of the officers in general staff. The first two parts, the first part was called Sebastopol in December. The second Sebastopol in may. And the third later on was Sebastopol in August.
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It's an enormously moving work. It's a portrayal of war and battle from the inside. It's one of the really great accounts. Uh, if in fact, uh, had war and peace never been written, we would still think of Tolstoy as a master of describing, uh, the battle. They, the sense of days nothingness that takes possession of the average soldier, the wandering quality, the Tolstoy in his diary, uh, at this time recounts how of all the worlds, recent literature you can tell. He said that everyone is a desktop general and have never been in Wars. I've never been in battles except for Stendhal Stendhal's description of the Napoleonic, uh, battles in the charter house at Parma. He said, stand out and show that Stendhal in fact new or firsthand later on when Tolstoy would translate Homer for himself. He was, uh, he was astounded at the Elliot when he read the Lei in, in Greek, he said that last one can see the bright sparkling, clear water passing through the natural teeth of men, of Homer as compared to kind of the tepid bruise that translators have offered us that somehow Homer also in the Elliot understood the psychology of battle.
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They kind of, uh, confusion and intensity the pathos and the transcendence that occurs on the battlefield. And every soldier
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Sebastopol was read by the emperor and the emperor, his mother, in fact, Nicholas, the second, the Tsar Nicholas, the second had just died. And the new czar Alexander, the second sent word to the front protect this man. His life is valuable Alexander the second mother, the dowager, or, uh, wept tears for days writing Sebastopol in December and Sebastopol in day, we have to understand, remember also at this time that Russian literature always has been censored. The Russian people have never been free to express their fullness to each other. They have always been bright birds with clipped wings and the sensor, uh, constantly would snip out and cross out sections so that when Tulstra, I would see his works in print, he would rage that these were not his works, but even with that kind of censorship, Tolstoy's early works already declaimed him as one of the really great writers Turgenev who was probably on a par with [inaudible]. And we could've just as well taken Turgenev as dusty asking the series said writers like he had dusty ASCII were just transition writers, just interesting because of the conditions in the culture at the time. But that Tolstoy belonged to eternity that he was one of the really great ones, this, all this, while he was still just writing his, his short stories. Uh, the short stories generally are 30, 40, 50 pages. So they're substantial
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In the description of Sebastopol Tolstoy recounts the way in which human life is subjected to the most in credible disorientation and how in reaction to eminent death, the human personality finally tiring of cringing turns to embrace that abrasiveness itself with joy and that in the midst of battle, the different sounds of shells as they go by, he says some hum like bees, some just shrill whistles, some are sudden flutters in the air, but that every time you realize that you are still alive, that has missed you, there is an elation that comes and then there is the dread that the next one is coming. And then the elation that is missed you. And this yo-yo constant cacophony of motion of depression, and the elation produces a mystical tone. And that a battlefield becomes almost like a temple of divinity
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Because the ordinary human capacities are stymied and man exists increasingly increasingly in a battle. And one of these suspended penumbras of never, never land within which if he has the insight, he sees the secrets of life and death because they are given an open to him immediately. In that context, almost like the image of the gods coming in the midst of the battle to carry the Val valorous off to Valhalla. That's a mythic presentation of this characteristic that psychologically occurs. So that in the midst of suffering man, and his sudden despair, sudden elation coming off and on in rapid fire, almost like priming the pump of detachment from all how's a capacity to see through the window of life and death to its ultimate mystery. He will, of course, later on in war and peace, raise this to the Epic fine art that almost no one will ever again, be able to, uh, to write in prose, um, that scale and that depth, we simply don't have the, uh, the reality, uh, to deal with push button Wars are tragic because they no longer contain, uh, any of this mystical human element at all.
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They're in fact, just a nightmares, nothing more after credit, the Crimea Tolstoy came back to Petersburg and, uh, found himself very much in demand. By this time he had published, uh, a number of stories. He had quite a few more on the way, and he was taken in as one of the new young giants of literature. In fact, the photograph was taken, uh, one of the early photographs and it showed the six new masters, young masters of modern literature, Russian literature, and there was Turgenev and necrosis off and Tolstoy was there among them dressed in his military uniform, looking, uh, with his, uh, grayish piercing eyes, um, rather proud of himself. The vanity bothered him later in life that he had desired so much to be, uh, a part of life to have the glory to, and then to have achieved it and wanting to save for it and finding that you cannot save her glory is not palpable for mat. It is misleading to desire it because it is not a quality that one can have. There's an immediate, uh, nostalgia for the legitimacy of one without this tone. And so triumph became a drug for Tolstoy. He wanted more and more fame. And then when he would have it, the disappointments grew and then he thought
(01:02:20):
One more time. Maybe I'll do it right the next time. And all of this was building and it would be building constantly for the next 10 or 15 years. And in this cycle of expectation, and then let down Tolstoy would experience in slow motion in the literary realm, what he'd experienced existentially and quick, rapid succession on the battlefield that all of this isn't illusion, none of it has to be trusted. None of it is to be entered into with any kind of confidence, the expectation or the realization itself that life simply is not anything one can have as a possession, but in order to broaden himself at this time, he realized that he had not really been out of the Russian orbit very much. He'd been to Bucharest. It was true. He'd been to syphilis. So he decided to go abroad to Paris and Switzerland.
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He went to the Serra and he went to the Stuttgart and Berlin all this time. He seemed to search himself to try and find some way that he could bring himself into sync with his own feeling tones. He would always be making less than what he needed to do or making resolutions to try and be a better person. And his confidant often during this time was his, uh, stepmother actually talked to you on a Alexon drove up, was not his stepmother. She never married his father. She refused to marry him. She said, I will be the mother for the children, but I want to remain pure, intact. And she was sort of the guardian angel for Leo Tolstoy. He constantly wrote to her, wrote to her in French, always wrote to her in French. And occasionally when he w wished to make a simple point, he would put a rushing in, but generally he wrote to auntie Tanya in, um, in French. And he told her at this time that he felt, uh, himself, uh, um, confident that he was going to probably be a major writer, that he had many stories in himself.
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And then the news of the death of his, one of his brothers, the first brother of his to die. And this letter translated to hunty Tatiana, the seal and the letter will have told you all. What I have been expecting from hour to hour for two weeks occurred at nine o'clock this evening. Only since yesterday, did he let me help him undress. And today for the first time, he definitely took to his bed and asked for a nurse. He was conscious all the time at a quarter of an hour before he died, he drank some milk and told me he was comfortable. Even today. He still joked and showed interest in my educational projects. Only a few minutes before he died. He whispered several times my God, my God. So his oldest brother, they model for his life. Nicholas Nicholson. Yeah. As he called him, passed on toast. I began to feel at this time, the urge for two simultaneous developments, the urge for legitimacy in literature and the urge to find legitimacy and education in both of these directions, he would develop almost to the level to where they are left today. By his death. We've made almost no advances in either in literature,
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Combining with his education. He made a discovery in Marsay. He was in, in France, in Marsay, and he went to the French schools and he found all the little French children just being drilled. He said, they all raised their hands at a command and they crossed their hands at a command. They go around in circles at a command. They sit at a command and then they are forced to study. And then they're forced to take exams and what they studied. And yet he said, one finds that one's expectation that French people would be doll. Robots is simply not true. So the mystery, how, how do they become humane? How did they become those lovely cultivated French people, which we know as obviously not from school, it's not from their education. So he began to open his eyes, notice the situation. And then he discovered that it was in the cafes, in the bars, in the open spaces that the French people educated each other by reading things out loud, by putting on little skits and productions by talking openly. And he said he made a great discovery. He discovered that every adult in Marsay had read Alexander Dumas.
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He realized
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The power of great literature to penetrate and educate and humanize the population. When read Dumas. He said, it's just fabulous. And so he began to, uh, read, uh, other writers like Dumont. He loved Dickens. He thought Dickens was very forthright. He loved, uh, Fenimore Cooper. He often said that he felt that something like the three Musketeers was much more valuable to civilization than King lair layer, something for the sophisticated to enjoy. The three Musketeers teaches you the labyrinthian complexities of life on a very popular level. And everyone loves D'Artagnan. You'd have to be very, very sorrowful person, not to love dark Darton so that Tolstoy's education and literary concerns began to interpenetrate began to overlap, but he was still blind to the fact that they in fact form a unity. He would realize that later on, but at this point in the late 1850s, early 1860s, Tolstoy was beginning to think of himself as beyond the age where one could have a family. The Russians loved large families he'd come from the Lawrence family.
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And he fell in love at this time with filthy there's, who was the younger of two daughters. And in fact, for a long time, the varus family thought he was going to marry Lisa, who was the older daughter. And there was a big to-do when he announced that it was the younger daughter, actually, that he enjoyed. And at the time that he married Sophie beers in 1862 Tolstoy also began to bring to a culmination, his artistic literary ambitions. And I say ambitions. He began to moot to himself war and peace as he developed war and peace in his mind in his spirit, one writes this in one's whole being, they fanning out of the complexities, began to absorb him and they happiness of his new marriage and the capacity of his young manhood. He was in his late thirties, made Warren peace. One of these great unflattering of a human being.
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And one of the reasons that Warren piece is so monumental is that it unfolds human personality to its fullest extent. Later on the psychological penetration of Anna, Karen anemia will exceed any one character in war and peace in psychological depth. And we'll be more refined in terms of artistic, uh, literature. But Warren piece is the great classic example of the slow patient, gradual unfolding of a human personality to a universal vision. The unfolding of the human self Pierre unfolds himself until at its farthest stretch where all the pedals are open. He fades into the cosmos because he realizes that that is the only place he could be. So that Warren pieces, this great tapestry of self-realization on an enormous level, Tolstoy was paid 75 pounds for every 16 page sheet of one piece. He became the highest paid writer in the
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World. This was
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Four or five times more than the premium C that had ever been paid to any other writer at all through the early 1860s while the U S civil war was going on. Ironically enough, Warren piece came out in installments in the Russian messenger, and it was finished early in 1866 just after the American civil war was finished. So almost as a ironic prelude to the great 20th century, Debico the cold war. The Soviet union in a fictive unfolding in the United States in a bloody practical unfolding came to terms with the specter of war and of the unfolding of personality. And in a way there is a great mystical world connection between Pierre's realizations and Lincoln's aspiration at some time when we have covered all the basic work and we have time to have lectures for sure. Daring and pleasure. We'll talk about these kinds of things.
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They,
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The development at this time, how Tolstoy was monumental when Warren piece came out yet astounded by its quality and sculpt every writer in the world, it was quickly seized upon as the great novel it was pointed to from the moment that the installments came out, that this was one of the, one of the great works. And we have a picture, I'm sorry, I don't have a slide facility at the Tulsa at the time. He was married and writing war and peace, but the intensity, the honesty, the marshaling of this bull like energy, this incredible mind facility to one great long, almost three, four years long project, and then slowly bringing it to culmination the realization that penetration of how human capacity can extend itself out to do this, to make this happen, to shape this. And as he did this, of course, Tolstoy realized more and more in himself that he was unsettling, some profound level of himself by this achievement. He was wise enough in life. He was pointed enough in intelligence to realize that when you have made a large combination like this, you have not only culminated the past, but you have opened a new threshold on a new kind of a future. And what Warren peace had culminated was a sense of personality and its ultimate stability, according to history, according to literature.
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And as soon as he tied that ball, he began to get rumblings in himself. That all was not right with himself in a very profound religious level. It would be another decade before it would come to the floor, but there were already rumbling Tolstoy in his diary 10 years before that has a collapse. He wrote of it at the time. He said, it feels as if the floor of the world has fallen out from under me. And I have no place to stand in my anxiety. I seek only to kill myself. I need to hide the guns every day. But one piece also made possible Tolstoy realizing that he had done the male personality. So he turned next to the female personality and as war and peace shows the great exfoliation of the masculine view of the world through roar and peace to transcendence and fullness.
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Ana Kara Nina shows the feminine poignancy of understanding, not only the world, but man also, and with Anna Carol Nina, which was completed in 1877, tall Tolstoy came closer and closer to the crisis. He was never completely well. He was often sick during his life. There would be little excerpts, but, um, he felt somehow that he could always bring himself back into order as he was writing. And, uh, Karen Nina and I wish to emphasize the education and literature went together at this time. So going together, he was writing an ABC book. It's awfully hard to find Tolstoy's ABC book translated into English. I used to have a copy, but it was pardon me confiscated by my ex-wife with a number of books that were taken. And I haven't been able to find a copy since then, but what tools do I want to do was to boil down educational processes via storytelling to its core.
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And so he wrote poignant, little simple stories to illustrate qualities of temperament, uh, insights of being for children and his ABC book was written at the same time. Yes, Anna, Kara Nina. Um, there's a story in there for instance of learning to ride a horse and all that, that entails about dogs, Tolstoy, loved dogs. You know, he had, uh, uh, when he went to the caucuses, uh, his, uh, bulldog, um, I, I forget the bull caught. That was the name of it. Bull co was tied up inside the house, threw himself against the plate glass window and ran 14 miles following Tolstoy. Until finally I realized that the, the dog was putting out a superhuman effort out of law and took the animal with him. The animal later died of, uh, Wolf bites, uh, in a, uh, in a fight with lows in the caucus, then mountain.
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Anyway, he wrote combinations of what we would identify off the cop as Aesop stables. Uh, in fact, some of the ABC book was translated into a little signet classic years ago called uh, uh, Tolstoy stables. And I do have that. I should have brought that tonight at any rate. The ABC book is, um, um, very, very fine work. It was of course, uh, criticized by just about everybody. The, uh, interior minister wanted to have it confiscated, wrote to the czar and said, this is, this is terrible. It's undermining the educational system, but the minister of education decided that, uh, the ABC book was all right. It should be published. Tolstoy also put out an educational newspaper. It's a very rare item. You almost, I've never seen a copy. There were 12 issues put out and it's called Yasnaya Pollyanna. And these 12 issues carried a experiments in education.
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Toaster. I thought of education that it should be a continual experiment. There should be no set curriculum. There should be no set organization. It should always be an experiment and there should be no examinations whatsoever. The ABC book came out. I think it says here, the first edition was thousand copies and he subsidized it. So it was very cheap, but all of his activities at integration had produced for Tosta a Chronicle psychological vacuum on a very poignant level. One cannot reach so far with the left hand that the right hand must also reach out to balance. And he had through war and peace through Anna, Karen Nina, through the ABC book, through all of his, uh, in genius and excellent short stories and short novels and set himself up for a fall. When it came Tolstoy was reduced to continuing the only expressive realm that still made sense to him.
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He wrote out exactly what was happening to him. That is to say he had a collapsed, but doesn't collapse like an ordinary person. It wasn't an ordinary nervous breakdown. Wasn't an ordinary, uh, about, uh, uh, uh, neurotic incapacity Tolstoy like Strindberg later on chronic called the thing day after day, week after week, month after month so that we can follow in Tolstoy's confession, a masterful human mind following the disintegration of its character. He writes, this is in translation from confession. That was what happened to me. I understood that it was no casual in disposition, but something very important and that if these questions constantly repeated themselves, it would be necessary to answer them. And I tried to do so. The question seems such stupid, simple, childish questions, but as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them, I once became convinced one that they are not childish and stupid, but the most important of the deepest of life questions and two that try as I would, I could not solve them.
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He said, I felt that what I'd been standing on had broken down and that I had left nothing under my seat. What I had lived on no longer existed. And I had nothing left to live on my life, came to a standstill. I could breathe. I could eat, I could drink and sleep and I could not help doing these things, but there was no life for, there was no wishes. The fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. There was no longer any reasonableness had a fairly common offer to fulfill my desires. I should not have known what to ask for. In moments of intoxication. I felt something which I cannot call a wish, but a habit left by former wishes in silver moments. I knew this to be a delusion and there is really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth where I guessed in what, uh, uh, and what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had, as it were lived, lived and walked, walked till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing I had of me. It was impossible to stop. It was impossible to go back and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead, but suffering and real depth, complete annihilation.
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He said the thought of self destruction now came to me as naturally. If thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly. And it was so seductive that I had to be wildly with myself less. I should carry it out to hastily. He used to not only hide the guns, but he would hide the components, the shot and the shell and the powder in different areas. So that would take him a long time to put it together. In his library, he had his dressing room converted to a library. There was a bar joining two large bookcases. And every time he would see that part, he would think of hangs. So say we would steal himself to walk from one portion of the room to another under that bar, because the overwhelming compulsion was to go and get some rope and hands. So he lived like this for a long time.
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And of course, it's like a dog having fleas. It's so chronic. It's so poignant that everything that one can think of and do is directed to that. And the scratching at it, the itching at it, the knowing it with the mind, just inflames, the whole issue so that he became a, a mess. And what was worse was that on the outside the world was praising him as the world's greatest novelist, his wife who really loved him giving birth to children, he had 10 or 11 children by her. The household was flourishing externally. Everything was there. Everything was all right with the world internally, there was nothing. And the contrast between these two capacities is what was eating Charleston, eating him alive. He said, my mental condition presented itself to me in this way. My life is a stupid and spiteful joke. Someone has played on me.
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No, I did not acknowledge a, someone who created me yet that form of representation that someone had played evil and stupid joke on me by placing me in the world. This was the form of expression that suggested itself most naturally to me and voluntarily at appeal period to me, that there somewhere is someone who amuses himself by watching how I live for 30 or 40 years, learning, developing, maturing, and body and mind, and how having now with matured, mental powers reach the summit of life from which it all lies before me. I stand on the summit and that's the problem. I stand on the summit, like an arch fool, seeing clearly that there is nothing in life and that there has been and will be nothing. And he is amused. Tolstoy's confession goes on in this thing for a couple of hundred pages, scathing self-criticism and yet he lived, he existed.
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He went on at this time in order to grab hold of himself, as someone will in this condition, Tolstoy began to try to literally immerse himself back into a ritual existence. There are times when one desires nothing more than to take refuge inside a shaman's hot and let the drums play that kind of a mentality, feeling tone. And at this time toaster, I would go out and he would plow the land all day, put on the Bootjack outfit outfit and the, uh, kind of a slouch hat and hook up the team and just plow all day just to have some contact with something and then dread going back into the house. And then once being there dread going out. And so this, uh, as a Turkey guard with so Apple, they call it the sickness unto death began to consume Tosta by 1879, when a confession was published, the cat was out of the bag.
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But the odd thing is that Telstar was considered by the external world as a even greater man. He'd only was a great artist, but he was a great moral leader, a great religious, uh, personage, uh, holding that, but it didn't help Tolstoy's problem at all. It just exacerbated everything. He did turned to success, everything he wrote, turned to triumph, and what he was doing was opening himself up to shell that there was no satisfaction, no reality anywhere there. So Tulsa, I made a vow to himself, never again, to write literature that it had become something reprehensible to him. That the only thing he would write from denim would be moral stories. And it would be for the didactic purpose of conveying the ethics. And only later on when he thought it through, did the concern with art come back and when it did the old toll still, I could still turn out stories that are just incredible. Thomas mine said, Tolstoy is one of those lions that makes writers like me, just my suit play around his paws, the death of Ivan Elliott, the criteria, Sonata, hygiene, Mirage, even the great novel resurrection that would come out in 1900 toaster idea, 73 years old, also the master still competent and capable of his powers, but almost all of Tulsa, his writings after this were religious in nature and bear Boris such titles, what is to be done?
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What is religion? What then must we do life of titles like this, I'm running out of time. I only have gotten halfway through his life, but, um, let me just curtail it in this way. Tolstoy became concerned with social issues to the point that he became the great voice of the Russian people. He wrote a public letter to the czar when they were taking a census in Moscow in 1881, I believe it was. And he said, whenever we have a census, we always exclude the hovels of the tens of thousands of impoverished people that the census takers, the young aristocrat, the on college students should be forced to go into the slums of Moscow. And now they count their heads. How many are there? But to note down the basic characteristics in necessities, in other words, to take an inventory of human misery Tolstoy himself went to the slums of Moscow during the census and week after week, month after month, it became apparent.
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The travesty of modern civilization even a hundred years ago, was grinding the human race into trash Tolstoy began writing books that were so critical of society and civilization and religion that he was often, uh, held up to, uh, public, uh, ridicule. And at the same time, public triumphs, all at the same time, he became the most famous man in the world. He in fact began to level, uh, poignant criticisms at the whole history of Christianity. He wrote a number of books. The most poignant of which is called the kingdom of God is within you. It came out in 1893 in which Tolstoy outlines that the law of love as taught by Jesus is exactly what is obscure by the church. This led of course, eventually to his excommunication. And he writes not only as a masterful individual who can understand this or who has seen this, but he writes with the attitude that if there is a politics that he could encourage, it would be Christian anarchism.
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And in fact, a great famine occurred another great famine in his lifetime. The second in 1891, 1892, and Tolstoy organized the food relief for the starving millions in the, uh, Russian countryside. And then the cities, Moscow Leningrad, and spent almost all of his great fortune at this time to make this a apparent, I wish we had time to go into this. It would take a whole lecture to outline the participation that throws two I had in the great famine of the early 1890s machines have given up. And I suppose our time has given up, he died in late 1910. I don't wish to go into the circumstances too much, except just to give you this point, um, visage, his loving wife over the years, over the strange 40 years of strain had become very fragile psychologically. And the old Tolstoy over 80, uh, woke one evening one night and found his wife going through his drawers in his private study, looking for his will.
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And he had left all of his works. Literary works to his daughter, not to his wife. So he got up after she left, put on his clothing and left his house left yesterday. I put you on a left his family and went on on the road like a fool himself to go and find some Holy place in Russia to be for his last few weeks. He was met by his favorite daughter Tatyana and a railway station. He fell ill. It was thought for several days that he was going to expire. They gave at that time in injections of camphor, which sort of stimulated the cardiovascular system was brought back around for a little bit. But finally in November of 1910, expired with the death of Tolstoy, a whole age came to a close. If there was a transition, if the Baton was passed on the only person that received at the time was MK Gandhi.
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And I've given that 13 part series on Gandhi, which takes the story from here. We'll probably at some time have to do another lecture or two on until story to see the second half of his life. All the nature works that he wrote. They're usually not regarded as worth reading by this petty society, which we have today. The pinball mentality is not one that could regard books, like what is art with any equanimity? But there are extraordinary, there are works that, uh, are equally important with the great literature that he produced in the first half of his life, because the mature Tolstoy was not unraveling. He was quite in possession of itself, right up to the end of his life. I suggest probably for your own edification to try and find the kingdom of God is within you. And when you begin reading it, you'll see what I mean. The poignancy of the man's mind qualifies him as the culmination of the whole 19th century and really the master spirit of that time. Well, we have to stop here simply because of the circumstance.

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