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    Leo Tolstoy: A Letter to a Hindu: Including Correspondences with Gandhi & Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby
    Leo Tolstoy: A Letter to a Hindu: Including Correspondences with Gandhi & Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby
    Leo Tolstoy: A Letter to a Hindu: Including Correspondences with Gandhi & Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Leo Tolstoy: A Letter to a Hindu: Including Correspondences with Gandhi & Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby

    By Leo Tolstoy, M. K. Gandhi, Aylmer Maude and Leo Wiener

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    About this ebook

    A Letter to a Hindu was a letter written by Leo Tolstoy to Tarak Nath Das on 14 December 1908 in response to two letters sent by Das, seeking support from the famous Russian author and thinker, for India's independence from British colonial rule. The letter was published in the Indian newspaper Free Hindustan and caused the young Mohandas Gandhi to write to the world-famous Tolstoy to ask for advice and for permission to reprint the Letter in Gandhi's own South African newspaper, Indian Opinion, in 1909. Mohandas Gandhi was stationed in South Africa at the time and just beginning his lifelong activist career. He then translated the letter himself, from the original English copy sent to India, into his native Gujarati. "Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby" (1896) was a letter written by Leo Tolstoy to Ernest Howard Crosby on "Non-Resistance" and must be read along with "A Letter to a Hindu" to understand the former's philosophy in a better light. Table of Contents: Introduction: Biography of Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby Correspondences with Gandhi Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. Born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1828, he is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) which are often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMusaicum Books
    Release dateJun 21, 2017
    ISBN9788075833167
    Leo Tolstoy: A Letter to a Hindu: Including Correspondences with Gandhi & Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby
    Author

    Leo Tolstoy

    Count Lev (Leo) Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born at Vasnaya Polyana in the Russian province of Tula in 1828. He inherited the family title aged nineteen, quit university and after a period of the kind of dissolute aristocratic life so convincingly portrayed in his later novels, joined the army, where he started to write. Travels in Europe opened him to western ideas, and he returned to his family estates to live as a benign landowner. In 1862 he married Sofia Behr, who bore him thirteen children. He expressed his increasingly subversive, but devout, views through prolific work that culminated in the immortal novels of his middle years, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Beloved in Russia and with a worldwide following, but feared by the Tsarist state and excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox church, he died in 1910.

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      Book preview

      Leo Tolstoy - Leo Tolstoy

      Leo Tolstoy, M. K. Gandhi

      Leo Tolstoy: A Letter to a Hindu

      Including Correspondences with Gandhi & Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby

      Published by

      Books

      - Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -

      musaicumbooks@okpublishing.info

      2017 OK Publishing

      ISBN 9788075833167

      Reading suggestions

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Leo Tolstoy: A Short Biography

      A Letter to a Hindu

      Letter to Ernest Howard Crosby

      Correspondences with Gandhi

      Introduction

      Table of Contents

      Leo Tolstoy: A Short Biography

      by Aylmer Maude

      Table of Contents

      COUNT LEO TOLSTOY was born 28th August 1828 [in the Julian calendar then used in Russia; 9th September 1828 in today’s internationally accepted Gregorian calendar], at a house in the country not many miles from Toúla, and about 130 miles south of Moscow.

      He has lived most of his life in the country, preferring it to town, and believing that people would be healthier and happier if they lived more natural lives, in touch with nature, instead of crowding together in cities.

      He lost his mother when he was three, and his father when he was nine years old. He remembers a boy visiting his brothers and himself when he was twelve years old, and bringing the news that they had found out at school that there was no God, and that all that was taught about God was a mere invention.

      He himself went to school in Moscow, and before he was grown up he had imbibed the opinion, generally current among educated Russians, that ‘religion’ is old-fashioned and superstitious, and that sensible and cultured people do not require it for themselves.

      After finishing school Tolstoy went to the University at Kazán. There he studied Oriental languages, but he did not pass the final examinations.

      In one of his books Tolstoy remarks how often the cleverest boy is at the bottom of the class. And this really does occur. A boy of active, independent mind, who has his own problems to think out, will often find it terribly hard to keep his attention on the lessons the master wants him to learn. The fashionable society Tolstoy met at his aunt’s house in Kazán was another obstacle to serious study.

      He then settled on his estate at Yásnaya Polyána, and tried to improve the condition of the serfs. His attempts were not very successful at the time, though they served to prepare him for work that came later. He had much to contend against in himself, and after three years he went to the Caucasus to economise, in order to pay off debts made at cards. Here he hunted, drank, wrote his first sketches, and entered the army, in which an elder brother to whom he was greatly attached was serving, and which was then engaged in subduing the native tribes.

      When the Crimean War began, in 1854, Tolstoy applied for active service, and was transferred to the army on the frontier of European Turkey, and then, soon after the siege began, to an artillery regiment engaged in the defence of Sevastopol. His uncle, Prince Gortchakóf, was commander-in-chief of the Russian army, and Tolstoy received an appointment to his staff. Here he obtained that first-hand knowledge of war which has helped him to speak on the subject with conviction. He saw war as it really is.

      The men who governed Russia, France, England, Sardinia, and Turkey had quarrelled about the custody of the ‘Holy Places’ in Palestine, and about the meaning of two lines in a treaty made in 1774 between Russia and Turkey.

      They stopped at home, but sent other people — most of them poorly paid, simple people, who knew nothing about the quarrel — to kill each other wholesale in order to settle it.

      Working men were taken from Lancashire, Yorkshire, Middlesex, Essex, and all parts of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, and Sardinia, and shipped, thousands of miles, to join a number of poor Turkish peasants in trying to kill Russian peasants. These latter had in most cases been forced unwillingly to leave their homes and families, and to march on foot thousands of miles to fight these people they never saw before, and against whom they bore no grudge.

      Some excuse had, of course, to be made for all this, and in England people were told the war was in defence of oppressed nationalities.

      When some 500,000 men had perished, and about £340,000,000 had been spent, those who governed said it was time to stop. They forgot all about the oppressed nationalities, but bargained about the number and kind of ships Russia might have on the Black Sea.

      Fifteen years later, when France and Germany were fighting each other, the Russian Government tore up that treaty, and the other Governments then said it did not matter. Later still, Lord Salisbury said that in the Crimean War we put our money on the wrong horse. To have said so at the time the people were killing each other would have been unpatriotic. In all countries truth, on such matters, spoken before it is stale, is unpatriotic.

      When the war was over Count Tolstoy left the army and settled in Petersburg. He was welcome to whatever advantages the society of the capital had to offer, for not only was he a nobleman and an officer, just back from the heroic defence of Sevastopol, but he was then already famous as a brilliant writer. He had written short sketches since he was twenty-three, and while still young was recognised among Russia’s foremost literary men.

      He had, therefore, fame, applause, and wealth — and at first he found these things very pleasant. But being a man of unusually sincere nature, he began in the second, and still more in the third, year of this kind of life, to ask himself seriously why people made such a fuss about the stories, novels, or poems, that he and other literary men were producing. If, said he, our work is really so valuable that it is worth what is paid for it, and worth all this praise and applause — it must be that we

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