Russian author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
A pensive Cabinet Card Photograph Signed, “Leo Tolstoy / 29 March 1901,” in Russian on the mount. The sepia tone photograph measures 4 inches wide by 5 * inches high; overall 4 1/16 inches wide by 6 5/16 inches high.
Leo Tolstoy joined the Russian Army in 1852 and served in the Crimean War during the siege of Sevastopol. At the end of the war, in 1856, he left the army, went to St. Petersburg and concentrated on his literary career. His epic work, War and Peace, one of the greatest novels of all times, was published in 1869.
With his intense personal military background, significant literary pieces about his military observations and his great novel, Leo Tolstoy experienced the use of violence to achieve goals. In the 1870s, he read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (Die welt als wille und Vorstellung) and was influenced by his philosophy. His own views of life were changing, as reflected in Anna Karenina (1877) which lacks the optimism of War and Peace. He was gradually converting to the ascetic morality found in Schopenhauer’s work.
Tolstoy’s Christian beliefs centered on the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the injunction to turn the other cheek which he saw as a justification for pacifism, nonviolence and nonresistance. His classic text of Christian anarchism, The Kingdom of God is Within You, in which he writes at length about his belief in nonviolence, was a direct influence on Mohandas Gandhi and ultimately on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.
The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy’s non-fiction magnum opus, was first published in Germany in 1894, after being banned in Russia. It was a culmination of almost three decades of his Christian thinking and laid out a new organization for society based on a literal Christian interpretation.
Already on a collision course with the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy pushed things to the breaking point with the publication of his novel Resurrection in 1900. The Church excommunicated him on February 22, 1901 (a month before this photograph was signed by him) for blasphemy. On April 4, 1901 Leo Tolstoy wrote to the church in response to his excommunication stating, “To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.”
The effect of Tolstoy’s excommunication was to increase his international fame so that he came to be regarded not only as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina but also as a thinker of great depth. His philosophy of life, which was so upsetting to the Russian Orthodox Church, would prove to have a great influence in the twentieth century, particularly on non-violent resistance movements.
Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, that The Kingdom of God Is Within You “overwhelmed” him and “left an abiding impression.” When Gandhi first read the book, he was still a young protester living in South Africa. Later he would read other works by Leo Tolstoy (A Letter to a Hindu) which outlines the notion that only by using love as a weapon through passive resistance could the native Indian people overthrow the colonial British empire) and in 1909, Gandhi wrote to him seeking advice and asking permission to republish A Letter to a Hindu in his native language. The two corresponded until Tolstoy’s death in 1910.
On the mount is the imprint of the photographer, written in French and embossed in gilt lettering: “Scherer et Nabholz / à Moscou.” The full pictorial imprint is on the verso, in Russian. Unframed; we can frame this piece for you.
Framed (with light tan inner and outer mats, in a carved wood, Russian style frame) dimensions: 10 3/8″ wide by 12 3/4 inches high.
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