The Gospel in Brief

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Toward the end of an exceptionally fruitful period of fiction writing in the 1860s and 1870s, in which he produced such enduring classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy was shaken by a personal and spiritual crisis that effectively halted his labors as a novelist. He had fallen into despair, become preoccupied with death and found himself on the verge of suicide, navigating existence with nothing more than the nihilistic belief that he was “an accidental clutter of parts, that there was no purpose in life and that life itself is evil.” In this deep existential anguish, Tolstoy recalled the Christianity he had seen in his youth and located some hope in the memory of the simple believers among whom he had grown up. He saw in these believers an example of a real, fulfilled life, and it was this recollection that encouraged him to begin a deep study of the Christian teaching as found in the Gospel. This spiritual crisis and its consequences are documented in detail in Tolstoy’s subsequent nonfiction work, serving as the impetus for his texts on personal spirituality, such as A Confession, What I Believe and The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

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