Calendar of Wisdom

Leo Tolstoy

Description

Over the last fifteen years of his life, Tolstoy collected and published the maxims of some of the world's greatest masters of philosophy, religion and literature, adding his own contributions to various questions that preoccupied him in old age, such as faith and existence, as well as matters of everyday life.Banned in Russia under Communism, A Calendar of Wisdom was Tolstoy's last major work, and one of his most popular both during and after his lifetime. This new translation by Roger Cockrell will offer today's generation of readers the chance to discover, day by day, these edifying and carefully selected pearls of wisdom.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714545691
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Calendar of Wisdom


A Calendar of Wisdom
Leo Tolstoy


Translated by Roger Cockrell

ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classics an imprint of
alma books Ltd 3 Castle Yard , Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
This selection from Tolstoy’s The Thoughts of Wise People for Every Day of the Year first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2015
Translation © Roger Cockrell, 2015
Cover image © nathanburtondesign.com
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-563-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Introduction
A Calendar of Wisdom
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Note on the Text
List of Abbreviations
Index of Authors and Sources


Introduction
On 15th March 1884, Tolstoy, now in his sixty-sixth year, made the following entry in his diary: “I need to compile for myself a Circle of Reading: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Pascal, the Gospels. This would be something that everybody would need.” The following year he returned to the idea, defining the project more closely as a “series of books and quotations… which focus on the one thing that man needs more than anything, and which constitutes his life and his salvation” (letter to Vladimir Chertkov of June 1885). It was not, however, until nearly twenty years later that he first began to turn this idea into reality, with the compilation, in 1903, of an anthology entitled The Thoughts of Wise People for Every Day of the Year . He was soon expressing his wish to work further on what he had begun to refer to as his “Calendar”, envisaging it as an extension and development of The Thoughts of Wise People . A year later, horrified by the generally primitive level of culture to which society had descended, he set to compiling what he was now to call a “Circle of the best writers”. “We all know,” he wrote, “about newspapers, about Zola, Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Rozanov and so on, but to be truly educated and enlightened is to be able to assimilate and take advantage of the entire spiritual legacy that has come down to us from our ancestors. I would very much like to be able to do something to redress this appalling situation” (letter to Gavrila Rusanov, 24th September 1904). After months of intensive reading and research, A Circle of Reading was finally published in 1905–6, with a second edition appearing in 1908. All the entries in this present volume – here given the generic title of A Calendar of Wisdom – have been taken from this revised edition.
A Circle of Reading differed from its predecessor The Thoughts of Wise People in two major respects: firstly, the number of entries for each day was increased from three to, in some cases, as many as fifteen; secondly, Tolstoy decided to include a number of larger extracts and readings in his anthology, appearing on a regular basis every seven days, beginning with the 7th of January; these were longer extracts from his own works, together with those of other authors. Despite the intrinsic interest of these extracts, their length, often amounting to a dozen pages or more, precludes them from appearing in a volume that is essentially a calendar for every day of the year.
The compilation of an anthology of ideas such as A Circle of Reading provided Tolstoy with the opportunity to highlight many of the concerns which he had championed all his life – implicitly in his fiction, from his earliest story ‘Childhood’ (1852) to his final novel Resurrection (1899), and explicitly in his post-conversion works such as What I Believe (1885), The Kingdom of God Is within You (1893) and What is Art? (1897). From the very first, the anthology conformed to a particular pattern: after introducing a particular theme with a brief maxim, he then went on to develop further reflections of his own, together with extracts from sacred texts, Eastern wisdom and the thoughts of some of the world’s greatest writers and philosophers, including particular favourites such as Marcus Aurelius, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Epictetus, Blaise Pascal, John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau.
At the age of twenty-four, Tolstoy had confided to his beloved “aunt Toinette” (his father’s cousin Tatyana Alexandrovna Yergolskaya) that religion and the experiences he had had so far had taught him that life was a “trial”, which he considered to be an “expiation” of his sins (letter of 12th January 1852). From the early-childhood games on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, featuring the solemn mysteries of the Green Stick and the Ant Brotherhood, to his final pilgrimage, he hardly ever seems to have viewed life as anything other than deeply serious. Not long before his death, Tolstoy was to criticize George Bernard Shaw for his play Man and Superman : “Its first defect is that you’re not sufficiently serious. One should not speak jokingly about such a subject as the purpose of human life…” (17th August 1908). This high level of seriousness is evident throughout the Calendar , whose overall aim is to promote the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth, and to urge us all to strive, through unrelenting effort, for self-improvement. Echoing what he writes in the afterword to his story The Kreutzer Sonata (first published in 1891), he acknowledges that complete moral perfection may be unattainable, but we must continually aim to approach it as closely as possible (11th November).
How, in Tolstoy’s opinion, can we be encouraged in our efforts to attain this ideal state? Certainly not with the aid of scientists and other experts, for whom the iconoclastic Tolstoy reserves his most scathing sarcasm. Enlightenment, he maintains, comes not through learning and knowledge, but by living a life of simplicity and truth, by avoiding the exploitation of animals and the eating of meat, by loving one’s neighbour, by adopting a policy of non-resistance to evil and by condemning the futility, immorality and evil of war. Above all we must be constantly aware that our intuitive reason is the only sure stepping stone to virtue – in Tolstoy’s own words, “The rational and the moral always coincide” (13th June). Whereas these rules for living the virtuous life may not always be followed in practice, many would find them acceptable in principle. Other Tolstoyan precepts and views are, however, more controversial. Take, for example, his conviction that a woman’s place is in the home, and that her responsibility is to “give birth to children rather than to ideas” (2nd June). Or his often expressed opinion that our inner sense of contentment does not depend on external circumstances, and that evil is to be found only “inside us” and “can be eradicated” (10th December). This was a notion that, a decade or so earlier, had received a fierce rebuttal in Anton Chekhov’s story ‘Ward No. 6’ (1892). More widely, by the end of the 1880s, Chekhov had begun to find the weight of Tolstoyan moralizing unbearable: “Common sense and justice,” he wrote to Alexei Suvorin, “tell me that there is more love for man in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstinence from meat…” (letter of 27th March 1894).
As always with Tolstoy, however, we must be wary of jumping to conclusions, for the Calendar bears witness to other, more rounded aspects of his character. For one thing, amid all the admonishments and exhortations, we can find ourselves surprised by a gentler, less austere side to Tolstoy: “Only those of us who know all our own weaknesses”, he says, “have the right to be indulgent towards the weaknesses of others” (30th July). He is not averse to the idea of innocent fun, or even to what he sees as “idle pleasures” such as astronomy and mathematics – which are permissible, so long as they “promote the spiritual good of mankind” (28th December). More importantly, although Tolstoy may be telling us all how we should live our lives, he is directing his remarks at least as much, if not primarily, at himself, reflecting his lifelong preoccupation with his own moral shortcomings. Behind the seemingly self-assured, authoritarian tone lies a troubled and ceaselessly questioning mind.
Although Tolstoy clearly has few illusions concerning the fallibility of humankind, he remains optimistic. “The age of harmony, forgiveness and love which must replace the age of strife, wars, executions and hatred cannot fail to come…” he tells us on 16th December. This may partly explain why, from the moment of publication in 1905 until his death five years later, he regarded A Circle of Reading as his favourite book. “I don’t understand,” he said to his private secretary, Nikolai Gusev, “how it is that people don’t make greater use of my Circle of Reading ; what can be more precious than to enter into daily communion with the world’s wisest people?” (Gusev’s diary entry for 16th May 1908). Although there is a certain irony in someone taking advantage of his erudition and formidable intellect to condemn precisely such attributes, he is right to be proud of his achievement. We may disagree with some of Tolstoy’s opinions, and not everyone will be able to subscribe to his particular spiritual beliefs. Yet this is a work for all seasons, a compendium of ideas and thoughts which challenge our preconceptions, affirm our common humanity, and remind us of our obligations to ourselves and to the world in whic