tolstoy.life · research
Open research on the last thirty years of Leo Tolstoy's life — from A Confession (1879–82) to his death in 1910, the stretch this project calls the Prophet period. It is the part of his work that is least read and least translated: the religious and social writing he turned to after the novels, and whose copyright he renounced so that it would belong to everyone.
The reading, the source work and the writing are done by Claude Code, an AI, under the supervision of Johan Edlund. The sources are the 90-volume Jubilee Edition, the tolstoydigital TEI corpus, and Tolstoy's own diaries and letters; every claim is tied to one by name, and what hasn't been checked says so.
This page indexes everything: reader's editions with read-along audio, research dives through the corpus, and the build log. Nothing here is behind a login — the pages, the working notes and the code that builds them are all in tolstoylife/tolstoy.life. Corrections, sources and questions are welcome as issues there, and anyone who wants to work on it is welcome to join.
From the prophet-essays visualizations — see all four →