Lecture 'Tolstoy and Death'

THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS CREATED BY A FOREIGN AGENT, DMITRY LVOVICH BYKOV, WHO IS INCLUDED IN THE REGISTER OF FOREIGN MASS MEDIA MEANS PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT, DATED 29.07.2022.

It so happened that Leo Tolstoy became the main Russian writer, because death is the main Russian theme. Let me emphasize: specifically Russian. The world has plenty of problems that are even heavier. But in Russia, where familiar meanings are often devalued and discredited, death comes through especially sharply and without embellishment. In essence, for the Russian person, besides life and death, almost nothing else remains.

“ The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” “Three Deaths,” the constant motifs of death in “War and Peace”—all of this ultimately turned into the central, inescapable line of Tolstoy’s reflections, and roughly in “The Diary of a Madman,” a wonderful but unfinished story, it led him to the idea of the incompatibility of death and consciousness. Through this strange, illogical, and tormenting path, he arrives at the idea of the immortality of the soul—this is all Tolstoy. Because the choice is absolute: either death, or everything else; death exists, but it must not be.

About Tolstoy’s main theme—about the dialectic of death, and about what made Tolstoy Russia’s No. 1 writer—this is addressed in the most life-affirming lecture, “Direct Speech.”