Excerpt from The Diaries of Leo Tolstoy When the records oi a great man's life are in question it is not so much the culmination — a matter of common knowledge — which interests one, but rather the first steps, the early indications of what he was eventually to prove himself. Of Tolstoy's Diaries, of which only a portion relating to his latter years has hitherto been published, it may be said that the good wine has been kept till now. The vintage Of Tolstoy's youth holds in a rare degree the essence of his matured philosophy. The Diaries, of which the first pages were written in 1846, were, from the beginning, Diaries of thoughts rather than of actions. They express many of the ideas which he was afterwards to expand in his polemical works, and they owe their vital quality not only to intimate, self-revealing touches, but because they voice the cry of Youth in all' climes and ages — Youth which is ever in spiritual con?ict between the external laws of life and the needs of the inner being. It was a subject upon which Tolstoy wrote and pondered much in the course of his long life.
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.
