The Book Whisperer wrote that we read in order to become better persons. I think Tolstoy wrote in order to become a better person.
The short stories that make this collection are masterfully written, and each one is concerned with questions of morality, the meaning of life and of death. The first and last story -- surprisingly -- are about the war in Chechnya (does anything ever change?). The ideals of simplicity and closeness to God (and on the other hand, the artificiality and clutter of the lives of the rich) are also very much part of Tolstoy's thought. Some characters live well and die well; others live badly and dies well. Some become saints and some murderers, one of them manages to be both.
Quotes:
[Tolstoy had] constant conflict within him between his innate artistic gift and the moral demands he made upon himself, the conflict, as he understood it, between beauty and the good.
[Tolstoy experienced] a conversion to what he called “true Christianity” as opposed to “Church Christianity.”
“Tolstoyism,” an anti-State, anti-Church, egalitarian doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, to be achieved by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance
“What will come of what I do now, of what I will do tomorrow—what will come of my whole life?” Formulated differently, the question would be the following: “Why should I live, why desire anything, why do anything?” It can also be put like this: “Is there a meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the death that inevitably awaits me?”
“If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truths can there be, if there is death?”
I came home and, while telling my wife about the profits of the estate, I suddenly felt ashamed. It became loathsome to me. I said I couldn’t buy the estate, because our profit would be based on people’s poverty and misfortune. [...] Above all the truth that the muzhiks want to live as much as we do, that they are people—brothers, sons of the Father, as the Gospel says.
And suddenly it became clear to me that all this should not exist. Not only that it should not exist, but that it does not exist, and if this does not exist, then there is no death or fear, and the former rending in me is no more, and I am no longer afraid of anything.
It was all done with clean hands, in clean shirts, with French words, and above all in the highest society, consequently with the approval of highly placed people. (about fornication)
He wept over his helplessness, over his terrible loneliness, over the cruelty of people, over the cruelty of God, over the absence of God. “Why have You done all this? Why have You brought me here? Why, why do You torment me so terribly?” (Ivan Illych)
The doctor said that his physical sufferings were terrible, and that was true; but more terrible than his physical sufferings were his moral sufferings, and these were his chief torment.
He sought his old habitual fear of death and could not find it. Where was it? What death? There was no more fear because there was no more death. Instead of death there was light. [...] “It’s finished!” someone said over him. He heard those words and repeated them in his soul. “Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more.”
"Never trust a horse in the field or a wife in the house." (peasant proverb)
[D]epravity is no physical outrage; but depravity, true depravity, lies precisely in freeing oneself of moral relations to a woman with whom you enter into physical contact.
Unhappy people live better in the city.
It is commonly thought that the most usual conservatives are the old, and the innovators are young people. That is not quite correct. The most usual conservatives are young people. Young people who want to live, but who do not think and have no time to think about how one should live, and who therefore choose as a model for themselves the life that was.
And again he hears the call of the one who already called out to him. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” his whole being says joyfully, tenderly. And he feels that he is free and nothing holds him any more.
She understood that he had become a monk in order to be higher than those who wanted to show him that they stood higher than he. (Father Sergius)
I lived for people under the pretext of God, she lives for God, fancying she’s living for people.
He read five chapters from Matthew, and they began to talk. They all listened, but only Ivan Chuyev took it to heart. He took it so much to heart that he began to live in God’s way in all things.
When Misaïl asked Chuyev if it was true that they called the holy icons “boards,” Chuyev answered: “Go turn over any icon you like, you’ll see for yourself.”
“So that’s what makes up the true faith,” he thought. “Only those will be saved who gave food and drink to the poor, visited the prisoners, and those who didn’t will go to hell. Yet the robber only repented on the cross, and all the same he went to paradise.” He saw no contradiction here, but, on the contrary, the one confirmed the other: that the merciful will go to paradise and the unmerciful to hell, meant that everybody should be merciful, and that Christ forgave the robber meant that Christ, too, was merciful.
Stepan astonished him by his simple, truthful, and calm answers. Makhin felt unconsciously that this man who stood before him in chains and with a shaved head, who had been brought in guarded and would be led back to be locked up by two soldiers, that this man was totally free, and morally stood inaccessibly higher than himself.
But he saw the man in himself only from a distance, and could not yield to simple human demands, owing to the demands that press upon a tsar from all sides; to acknowledge human demands as more obligatory than the demands of a tsar was beyond his strength.
No one saw in that death the most important moment of that life—its ending and returning to the source from which it had come—but saw only the gallantry of a dashing officer falling upon the mountaineers with his saber and desperately cutting them down.
And indeed, as if to confirm their expectations, in the midst of their talk they heard, to the left of the road, the bracing, beautiful sound of a sharp, cracking rifle shot, and with a merry whistle a little bullet flew by somewhere in the foggy air and smacked into a tree.
Poltoratsky had never expected this fearsome mountaineer to be like that. He had expected to see a gloomy, dry, alien man, and before him was a most simple man, who smiled such a kindly smile that he seemed not alien, but a long-familiar friend.
The eyes of these two men, as they met, said much to each other that could not be expressed in words and that certainly was not what the interpreter was saying. They spoke the whole truth about each other directly, without words.
To disagree with Nicholas’s orders meant to lose all that brilliant position which he now enjoyed, and which he had spent forty years acquiring. And therefore he humbly bowed his dark, graying head in a sign of submission and readiness to carry out the cruel, insane, and dishonest supreme will.
The old heads of households gathered on the square and, squatting down, discussed their situation. Of hatred for the Russians no one even spoke. The feeling that was experienced by all the Chechens, big and small, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but a refusal to recognize these Russian dogs as human beings, and such loathing, disgust, and bewilderment before the absurd cruelty of these beings, that the wish to exterminate them, like the wish to exterminate rats, venomous spiders, and wolves, was as natural as the sense of self-preservation.
