"What kind of Christian did Tolstoy call himself?" — the label in his own reply
theme · 2026-05-30 · Prophet period (post-1880)
When asked whether he was a Christian, what did Tolstoy reply — did he claim the bare label, or qualify/reframe it because the word is so tied to the churches?
Against the death penalty — Tolstoy's writings against capital punishment and state killing, 1900–1910
theme · 2026-06-13 · prophet
How, across the last decade of his life, did Tolstoy build a sustained moral case against capital punishment and state killing — from «Не убий» (1900, on the assassination of King Umberto) through…
Art & aesthetics satellites — the What Is Art? prefaces and case-studies
theme · 2026-06-21 · Prophet period (post-1880); the four pieces span 1888–1909, clustered around What Is Art? (1897–98)
Four short Tolstoy pieces that apply his What Is Art? (1897–98) religious-art test to specific cases: the Maupassant preface (1893–94), the preface to the English edition of What Is Art? (1898), On…
Biryukov and Sofia: the dedication, the withheld lover, and the contested diaries
theme · 2026-05-31 · 1862; 1895; 1897–1910 (biography-making + the will/diaries crisis)
The story behind Biryukov's warm 1908 dedication to Sofia in Vol II; whether it connects to his withholding a pre-marriage lover's name; the (strained) Biryukov–Sofia relationship; and the lines…
Crisis: how Tolstoy named — and did not name — his transformation of 1879–1882
theme · 2026-05-29 · prophet
Did Tolstoy frame his late-1870s/early-1880s religious transformation as a "crisis" (кризис), or is "crisis" a label applied from outside (editorial apparatus, biography) — as with the term…
Fire and light in Tolstoy: the metaphor, and his rewriting of the Gospels
theme · 2026-06-03 · prophet
How does Tolstoy use the fire metaphor (and the adjacent light axis) across the local corpus, and how does his own translation/harmony of the four Gospels recast the Bible's fire and light language…
Stories for the People (народные рассказы)
theme · 2026-06-11 · 1879–1910 (core composition window 1881–1887)
Tolstoy's народные рассказы (1881–1887) as a project: why he wrote moral parables for the people after rejecting conventional peasant fiction; how the Posrednik machinery (Chertkov, Sytin, the kopeck…
The break with the Church — Tolstoy, the Holy Synod, and the 1901 excommunication
theme · 2026-06-13 · 1893–1908, centred on the 1901–1902 cluster (the spine event = the Feb 1901 edict)
The 1901 break between Tolstoy and the Russian Orthodox Church: the Holy Synod's edict of 20–22 February 1901, Tolstoy's «Ответ Синоду», and the cluster of anticlerical works around it («К…
The late voice — encryption & compression (1900–1910)
theme · 2026-06-12 · 1900–1910 core (Prophet period), with 1880s–90s roots admitted through existing dives only
Two related threads, encryption leading.
The народные рассказы of 1903 — Tolstoy's folk tales after Kishinev
theme · 2026-06-11 · 1903 (with the legend's genesis in Nov 1902)
Tolstoy's return to the народный рассказ form in 1903, sixteen years after the Posrednik cycle: the genesis (the Kishinev pogrom and Sholom Aleichem's relief almanac), the moral core (the unity of…
The народный рассказ in Круг чтения — Tolstoy's 1905–06 weekly-reading tales
theme · 2026-06-12 · 1905–1906 (Божеское и человеческое conceived 1897, first drafted 1903)
Tolstoy's third movement of the народный рассказ form: the six original tales written in 1905–06 for the weekly-reading (недельное чтение) slot of the anthology Круг чтения — Алёша Горшок, Корней…
Tolstoy and "Christian anarchism"
theme · 2026-05-30 · prophet
Where, and in what voice, does Tolstoy engage the label «христианский анархизм» / 'anarchist' across the local corpus — given that Eltzbacher (1900) canonised him as an anarchist, that he refused the…
Tolstoy and the Gospels: the translation project, its history, and the strain at home
theme · 2026-06-05 · conversion + prophet (focus 1878–1896; afterlife to 1957/2011)
How and why did Tolstoy come to translate and harmonize the four Gospels; what was his method; how did the work affect his family life; how is the project situated in the Jubilee Edition / TEI…
Tolstoy on copyright and the renunciation of literary property
theme · 2026-05-29 · prophet
Where across the local corpus (tolstoydigital TEI + Jubilee Edition PDFs) does Tolstoy discuss copyright, ownership of his writings, and the renunciation of literary property, and how does that…
Tolstoy's Lord's Prayer: «Отче наш» rewritten — and a Swedish «Fader vår»
theme · 2026-06-06 · prophet (composition 1880-81; Tom 24 first legal Russian printing 1957)
What did Tolstoy actually do to the Lord's Prayer when he translated and harmonized the Gospels (1880-81)? Extract his own renderings across PSS Tom 24 (the close retranslation in Matthew 6, the…