“The heroine of my writings, she whom I love with all the forces of my being, she who always was, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.”[1]
The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the death of his brother.[2] The truth, the pivot of his life, the rock in the midst of an ocean.
But very soon the “horrible truth”[3] was no longer enough for him. Love had supplanted it. It was the living spring of his childhood; “the natural state of his soul”[4] When the moral crisis of 1880 came he never relinquished the truth; he made way for love.[5]
Love is “the basis of energy.”[6] Love is the “reason of life; the only reason, with beauty.”[7] Love is the essence of Tolstoy ripened by life, of the author of War and Peace and the Letter to the Holy Synod.[8]
- ↑ Sebastopol in May, 1853.
- ↑ “The truth… the only thing that has been left me of my moral conceptions, the sole thing that I shall still fulfil” (October 17, 1860.)
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ “The love of men is the natural state of the soul, and we do not observe it.” (Journal, while he was a student at Kazan.)
- ↑ “The truth will make way for love.” (Confessions.)
- ↑ “‘You are always talking of energy? But the basis of energy is love,’ said Anna, ‘and love does not come at will.’” (Anna Karenin.)
- ↑ “Beauty and love, those two sole reasons for human existence.” (War and Peace.)
- ↑ “I believe in God, who for me is Love” (To the Holy Synod, 1901.)
“‘Yes, love!… Not selfish love, but love as I knew it, for the first time in my life, when I saw my enemy dying at my
