The RussianAufklärer: Tolstoi in Search of Truth, Freedom, and Immortality

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 70, Heft 4, S. 773-794

Abstract

Lev Tolstoi, in his dunking about life, death, freedom, and immortality, drew significandy on the German philosophical tradition from Leibniz and Moses Mendelssohn to Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, as Lina Steiner argues in this article. Herder, who tried to salvage rationalism by getting away from the mechanistic metaphysics of the French Enlightenment and reintroducing the teleological explanation of nature, was a particularly important influence on Tolstoi. Herder's view of life, including both individual life and the life of community, as organic Bildung underlay the artistic conception ofWar and Peace, Tolstoi's first major fictional narrative. Tolstoi continued to develop this organicist paradigm in his later sociopolitical, religious, and aesthietic writings.