Buku ini memuat lima cerita terbaik Leo Tolstoy, sastrawan besar Rusia, yang bertema cinta spiritual—di mana mengasihi sesama adalah kebajikan mulia dan hanya melalui pengabdian tulus kepada sesamalah manusia bisa meraih kebahagiaan sejati. Cerita pertama yang menjadi judul buku ini mengisahkan seorang tukang sepatu yang kecewa kepada Tuhan karena anaknya mati. Namun, pada masa tuanya ia terpanggil untuk kembali ke jalan lurus dan bercita-cita bertemu Tuhan. Dalam mimpinya, ia diperintahkan Tuhan agar melongok keluar jendela jika ingin bertemu dengan-Nya. Ternyata esoknya yang ditemuinya adalah orang-orang malang yang hidup dalam kesusahan. Karena belas kasih, dengan tulus ia menolong mereka. Barulah ia sadar bahwa sesungguhnya Tuhan memerintahkannya agar berbuat baik kepada sesama jika ingin “bertemu Tuhan”. Inilah sebuah kitab klasik karya maestro sastra dunia yang tak hanya melipur hati, tapi juga mencerahkan jiwa.
Author
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
