Tolstoy's Lord's Prayer: «Отче наш» rewritten — and a Swedish «Fader vår»

A focused follow-up to the gospel-translation dive, drilling into one passage that dive only touched in passing: what Tolstoy actually did to the Lord’s Prayer («Отче наш») when he translated and harmonized the Gospels in 1880–81. The parent dive recorded his claim that the prayer mirrored his twelve chapters; this dive extracts the prayer itself — the close retranslation, the transformed version, and the twelve-fold expansion — reads the diaries and letters of the composition years for his reactions while he worked, and renders the result into a Swedish «Fader vår», the name the prayer carries in Sweden. All Russian is byte-verified against the local Jubilee-Edition TEI corpus (PSS Tom 24); the Swedish and English are this dive’s own working renderings.

Key findings

• Tolstoy did not translate the Lord’s Prayer once — he produced a family of versions. Tom 24 holds at least four: a close retranslation in the Sermon-on-the-Mount chapter (Matt 6), a transformed version in the “On Prayer” chapter (Luke 11), the twelve-fold phrase-by-phrase expansion that opens the Gospel in Brief, and a recitable condensed prayer in that book’s body — plus the French Abrégé’s section-headings. They agree in substance and differ in wording.
• He read the Lord’s Prayer as the abolition of prayer. For Tolstoy the passage is not a formula to repeat but Jesus’s instruction that petitionary prayer is needless — «Как еще яснее сказать, что не нужно молиться?» (“How could it be said more plainly that one must not pray?”). The whole prayer, he says, is the wish for God’s kingdom and the forgiving of everyone.
• The signature substitutions are pneuma and reason for kingdom and glory. “Give us our daily bread” becomes the nourishment of the spirit; the closing “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory” becomes “thine is the power and the strength and the reason (разум)” / “the decision (решение)”. “Hallowed be thy name” becomes “may thy being be holy”.
• In Luke he adopted a genuine ancient variant. Where the received text has “thy kingdom come,” Tolstoy’s Luke reads «да сойдет в нас дух твой и очистит нас» — “may thy spirit descend into us and cleanse us.” His footnote notes it is found “in citations of ancient church writers.” Modern text-criticism confirms the pedigree: this reading is attested in minuscules 700 and 162, in Marcion’s Luke (c. 150 CE) and in Gregory of Nyssa — Tolstoy selected a marginal-but-old reading because it suited his theology.
• On “daily bread” he chose the οὐσία etymology. He calls насущный (“daily”) a mistranslation of the famous hapax ἐπιούσιος and renders it необходимый (“necessary”) / “that which gives existence” — the same etymological line that produced Jerome’s Vulgate supersubstantialem.
• The diaries and letters of 1880–81 react to the labour, not to the prayer. A full pass over the composition-year correspondence (Tom 63) and the 1881 diary (Tom 49) finds Tolstoy naming the Sermon on the Mount as “the essence of the teaching,” thanking Strakhov for the Tischendorf Greek New Testament (the very text he cites in his Luke footnote), and reporting in July 1881 that he had finished the big harmony and made the short extract “with a short preface” — the preface where the twelve-fold prayer-correspondence lives. But no diary entry or letter of the composition years discusses «Отче наш» in its own right: the prayer is worked out entirely inside the text of the harmony.

Why this matters

The gospel-translation dive showed that Tolstoy rewrote the Gospels and how the project sat in his life and marriage. This dive takes the single most familiar Christian text — the one prayer almost every reader already knows by heart — and shows exactly what his method did to it, word by word. Because the reader can hold Tolstoy’s version against the prayer they already carry, the Lord’s Prayer is the clearest possible specimen of his whole enterprise: the de-supernaturalizing, the harmonize-by-meaning, the swapping of spirit and reason for kingdom and glory, and the radical claim that the model prayer is really an instruction to stop praying. The Swedish rendering makes that specimen available in the cadence a Swedish reader recognizes.

The shape of the question

Each stage gives Tolstoy’s verbatim Russian, a working-English translation, and the source (PSS Tom 24; TEI id). Translations are this dive’s own working renderings, not published ones. The four canonical Russian forms are labelled A–D.

1 — The prayer that abolishes prayer

Tolstoy frames the whole passage by Matthew 6:7–8 (the Father “knows what you need before you open your lips”), and concludes that the so-called Lord’s Prayer is not a prayer at all but the refutation of prayer:

«Как еще яснее сказать, что не нужно молиться?» “How could it be said more plainly that one must not pray?” (working English) — Соединение и перевод четырёх Евангелий, PSS Tom 24

«Вся молитва должна состоять в желании царства Божия и в исполнении его правил, а все правила в том, чтобы не считать никого виновным, а всех любить и прощать.» “The whole prayer must consist in the desire for God’s kingdom and in the fulfilment of its rules, and all the rules are: to hold no one guilty, but to love and forgive everyone.” (working English) — Соединение и перевод четырёх Евангелий, PSS Tom 24

The same point governs the condensed redaction, where the chapter on the kingdom states it flatly:

«Ни молиться, ни поститься не нужно. Молиться не нужно потому, что отец знает всё, что людям нужно.» “Neither to pray nor to fast is needed. To pray is not needed, because the Father knows everything that people need.” (working English) — Краткое изложение Евангелия, PSS Tom 24

And the French Abrégé says it in Tolstoy’s own French (D):

«La prière ne peut pas consister dans les demandes que nous faisons à Dieu. Notre Père connaît tous nos besoins avant même que nous ne les ayons formulés.» “Prayer cannot consist in the requests we make to God. Our Father knows all our needs even before we have formulated them.” (Tolstoy’s French; Abrégé de l’Évangile, PSS Tom 24)

2 — Version A: the close retranslation (Matthew 6)

In the Sermon-on-the-Mount chapter Tolstoy sets his rendering directly under the Greek and the canonical text. His own line collapses and re-points the opening petitions:

«Так вот как молитесь: Отец! Чтобы было твое царство. Пусть будет твоя воля в тебе и во мне.» “So pray thus: Father! That thy kingdom be. May thy will be in thee and in me.” (working English) — Tolstoy’s rendering of Matt 6:9–10, PSS Tom 24

Two deliberate moves are footnoted. He drops “who art in heaven” as absent from Luke, and he re-translates “as in heaven, so on earth” as “in thee and in me”:

«„Как на небе и на земле“ я перевожу: „в тебе и во мне“.» “‘As in heaven and on earth’ I translate: ‘in thee and in me’.” (working English) — note to Matt 6:10, PSS Tom 24

For the bread he rejects “daily”:

«Денное пропитание дай нам с нужду.» … «слово это значит: необходимый.» “Give us the day’s sustenance as we need it.” … “this word means: necessary.” (working English) — Tolstoy’s rendering + note to Matt 6:11 (on ἐπιούσιος), PSS Tom 24

He folds forgiveness into a single clause and excises “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” altogether as verbiage that “contains no thought” and breaks the sense:

«И прости нам наши вины за то, что мы прощаем всякому, кто виноват перед нами.» “And forgive us our faults because we forgive everyone who is at fault before us.” (working English) — Tolstoy’s rendering of Matt 6:12–13, PSS Tom 24

3 — Version B: the transformed prayer (Luke 11) — “thy spirit descend and cleanse us”

In the “On Prayer” chapter Tolstoy renders the Lukan form, and here the rewriting is deepest. The kingdom petition is replaced by the descent of the spirit:

«И Иисус сказал им: когда молитесь, говорите: Отец! да будешь ты свят в нас, да объявится царство твое, т. е. да будет воля твоя; да сойдет в нас дух твой и очистит нас.» “And Jesus said to them: when you pray, say: Father! mayest thou be holy in us, may thy kingdom be made manifest, that is, may thy will be done; may thy spirit descend into us and cleanse us.” (working English) — Tolstoy’s rendering of Luke 11:2, PSS Tom 24

“Bread” becomes the spirit’s food, and “debts” becomes a plea not to be called to account:

«Дай нам питание духа, то, которое дает жизнь.» “Give us the nourishment of the spirit, that which gives life.” (working English) — Tolstoy’s rendering of Luke 11:3, PSS Tom 24

«И не взыскивай с нас всё, чем мы должны, потому что и мы не взыскиваем с тех, что нам должны. И не считайся с нами.» “And do not exact from us all that we owe, because we too do not exact from those who owe us. And do not reckon with us.” (working English) — Tolstoy’s rendering of Luke 11:4, PSS Tom 24

His footnote shows he knew the “spirit” reading was not the mainstream text but an old one:

«слова: да сойдет дух твой в нас и очистит нас встречаются в цитатах древних церковных писателей.» “the words ‘may thy spirit descend into us and cleanse us’ are found in citations of ancient church writers.” (working English) — note to Luke 11:2, PSS Tom 24

And he glosses the debt-clause with his own metaphysics — we are insolvent debtors to reason (разумение), and the one thing in our power is to stop reckoning with others:

«Мы обязаны жизнью разумению, а не отдаем ему всю свою плотскую жизнь, и потому мы должники неоплатные.» “We owe our life to reason, yet do not give over to it our whole fleshly life, and so we are debtors who can never pay.” (working English) — note to Luke 11:4, PSS Tom 24

4 — Version C: the twelve-fold prayer (the Gospel in Brief)

This is the version Tolstoy himself foregrounds. Having arranged his harmony into twelve chapters, he reports finding — “to my surprise and joy” — that the Lord’s Prayer is the whole teaching in miniature, its phrases falling in the order of his chapters:

«Окончив свою работу, я к удивлению и радости своей нашел, что так называемая молитва господня есть не что иное, как в самой сжатой форме выраженное всё учение Иисуса в том самом порядке, в котором были расположены мною главы, и что каждое выражение молитвы соответствует смыслу и порядку глав.» “On finishing my work I found, to my surprise and joy, that the so-called Lord’s Prayer is nothing other than the whole teaching of Jesus expressed in the most condensed form, in the very order in which I had arranged the chapters, and that each phrase of the prayer corresponds to the sense and order of the chapters.” (working English) — Краткое изложение Евангелия, preface, PSS Tom 24

He then prints the correspondence — each Church-Slavonic phrase against its meaning. The table below gives Tolstoy’s Russian verbatim, with a working-English gloss:

The twelve meanings are the titles of his twelve chapters (Son of God · God is Spirit · The origin of reason · The Kingdom of God · True life · False life · I and the Father are one · Life not in time · Temptations · The struggle with temptations · The farewell discourse · The victory of spirit over flesh). The closing line is the signature: царство (“kingdom”) → власть (“power”), and слава (“glory”) → разум (“reason”).

5 — Version C, the body: the recitable prayer

In the body of the Gospel in Brief the same prayer is given as a continuous text — the single form that most reads like a prayer one could actually say:

«Молитесь только так: Отец наш безначальный и бесконечный, как небо! Пусть будет свято только твое существо. Пусть будет власть только твоя, так, чтобы воля твоя совершалась безначально и бесконечно на земле. Дай мне пищу жизни в настоящем. Ошибки мои прежние загладь и сотри так же, как и я заглаживаю и стираю все ошибки братьев моих, чтобы я не попал в соблазн, избавился от зла. Потому что твоя власть и сила и твое решение.» — Краткое изложение Евангелия, PSS Tom 24

“Pray only thus: Our Father, without beginning and without end, like the sky! / May thy being alone be holy. / May power alone be thine, so that thy will be done, without beginning and without end, on earth. / Give me the food of life in the present. / My former mistakes, efface and wipe them out, just as I efface and wipe out all the mistakes of my brothers, so that I may not fall into temptation, and may be delivered from evil. / Because thine is the power and the strength and thine the decision.” (working English)

The contemporary English of this passage — from the anonymous Gospels in Brief (T. Y. Crowell, New York, 1896) — renders the close “Because Thine is the power and might, and Thine the judgment”, confirming that решение here carries the sense of judgment / the final say, not “glory”.

6 — Reactions while he worked (1880–81)

The composition years are documented in Tolstoy’s letters (Tom 63) and his 1881 diary (Tom 49). They show the labour and its urgency — but, importantly, the Lord’s Prayer is never their subject: it is worked out inside the harmony, not discussed outside it.

In February 1880 the work is grinding and joyless but driven by necessity; he is still finishing the critique of theology before the translation proper:

«Бумаги измарал много с большим напряжением и не скажу радостью, но с уверенностью, что это так нужно.» “I have covered much paper, with great strain and — I will not say joy, but — with the conviction that it is necessary.” (working English) — to N. N. Strakhov, 29 Feb 1880, PSS Tom 63

A month later the same work has him in its grip:

«Я все работаю и не могу оторваться и часто счастлив своей работой, но очень часто слабею головой.» “I keep working and cannot tear myself away, and am often happy in my work, but very often my head grows weak.” (working English) — to N. N. Strakhov, 23 Mar 1880, PSS Tom 63

To his cousin he names where the teaching’s centre lies — the Sermon on the Mount, the chapter that contains the prayer:

«…сущность учения в Нагорной проповеди.» “…the essence of the teaching is in the Sermon on the Mount.” (working English) — to A. A. Tolstaya, 2–3 Feb 1880, PSS Tom 63

In September 1880 Strakhov sends him the instrument of the philology — Tischendorf’s critical Greek New Testament, the very text Tolstoy cites by name in his Luke footnote:

«Очень благодарен вам за Тишендорфское евангелие. … Работы, работы мне впереди бездна, а сил мало.» “I am very grateful to you for the Tischendorf gospel. … Work, work — an abyss of it ahead of me, and little strength.” (working English) — to N. N. Strakhov, 1 Sep 1880, PSS Tom 63

By July 1881 the structure is finished and the condensed book — preface and all — is made; that preface is exactly where the twelve-fold prayer-correspondence stands:

«Из большего сочинения, которое я после вас и кончил, и еще раз все прошел, я сделал еще из Евангелия извлечение без примечаний, но с коротким предисловием…» “Out of the larger work, which I have finished since you were here and gone through once more, I have made an extract from the Gospel, without notes but with a short preface…” (working English) — to N. N. Strakhov, 1–8 July 1881, PSS Tom 63

And the 1881 diary supplies the temperature of the conviction the prayer encodes — the kingdom of heaven on earth, the impossibility of calling the one escape “difficult,” and the household’s verdict (which, like the gospel-translation dive’s keystone, turns on the word madman):

«Он хотел бы, чтобы на земле было царство небесное. … нельзя сказать „трудно“ бежать из горящей комнаты в единственную дверь. … Кто-нибудь сумашедший — они или я.» “He would like the kingdom of heaven to be on earth. … one cannot say it is ‘difficult’ to run from a burning room through the only door. … One of us is mad — they or I.” (working English) — Diary, 18 May 1881, PSS Tom 49

The burning-room image — the gospel as the single door out of a burning house — is the same fire-and-rescue register the sibling fire-metaphor dive traces through Luke 12:49.

The Swedish «Fader vår»

The deliverable the reader asked for: Tolstoy’s prayer in Swedish, under the name it carries in Sweden. The scaffold is the traditional Swedish text (the 1917 church-bible / liturgical form, Fader vår, som är i himmelen — not the 1981 revision Vår Fader), so a Swedish reader hears Tolstoy’s meaning against the cadence already in the ear. These are this dive’s own working renderings of Tolstoy’s Russian; the editorial choices are flagged below for adjustment.

The traditional Swedish «Fader vår» (the scaffold):

Fader vår, som är i himmelen. Helgat varde ditt namn. Tillkomme ditt rike. Ske din vilja, såsom i himmelen, så ock på jorden. Vårt dagliga bröd giv oss idag, och förlåt oss våra skulder, såsom ock vi förlåta dem oss skyldiga äro, och inled oss icke i frestelse, utan fräls oss ifrån ondo. Ty riket är ditt och makten och härligheten i evighet. Amen.

Tolstojs «Fader vår» — the recitable form (Version C-body), rendered into Swedish in the traditional register:

Bed allenast så: Fader vår, utan begynnelse och utan ände, såsom himmelen! Må allenast ditt väsen vara heligt. Må allenast makten vara din, så att din vilja sker utan begynnelse och utan ände på jorden. Giv mig livets föda i det närvarande. Mina forna misstag, utplåna och stryk ut dem, såsom ock jag utplånar och stryker ut alla mina bröders misstag, så att jag icke faller i frestelse, utan varder frälst ifrån ondo. Ty din är makten och kraften, och ditt är avgörandet.

The twelve-fold correspondence in Swedish (Version C) — each traditional petition set against Tolstoy’s meaning, the way he himself laid it out:

Two further variants, for the range:

A (Matteus 6, den nära omöversättningen): Fader! Att ditt rike må vara. Må din vilja ske i dig och i mig. … Giv oss dagligt uppehälle efter behov. … Och förlåt oss våra skulder, därför att vi förlåta var och en som är skyldig inför oss. (Tolstoy stryker «inled oss icke i frestelse, utan fräls oss ifrån ondo» helt, och översätter «såsom i himmelen, så ock på jorden» med «i dig och i mig».)

B (Lukas 11, anden som stiger ned): Fader! Må du vara helig i oss, må ditt rike uppenbaras, det vill säga: må din vilja ske; må din ande sänka sig ned i oss och rena oss. Giv oss andens näring, den som ger liv. Och utkräv icke av oss allt vad vi äro skyldiga, ty också vi utkräva icke av dem som äro oss skyldiga. Och håll ingen räkning med oss.

Editorial choices (for Johan to weigh):

• härlighet → förnuft. The single most pointed move: where the traditional doxology ends “och härligheten” (glory), Tolstoy’s ends разум / решение. The twelve-fold table renders разум as förnuftet (reason); the recitable prayer renders решение as avgörandet (the decision / final say — the Crowell 1896 English chose “judgment”). Both are defensible; “förnuft” carries the Tolstoyan keyword.
• namn → väsen. “Helgat varde ditt namn” becomes “må ditt väsen vara heligt” — существо is being/essence, not “name.”
• allenast. Used for Tolstoy’s emphatic только (“only”) in the recitable prayer; endast is the plainer modern option if the archaic register feels heavy.
• förledas for the temptation petition keeps the in-led / för-led echo of “inled oss icke.”
• Register throughout leans archaic-liturgical (varde, giv, ock, ifrån ondo) to match the 1917 scaffold; a plainer modern Swedish is available if preferred.

Where the theme clusters

The renderings (all PSS Tom 24):

The composition-year witnesses (1880–81):

Scholarly context

The dive’s spine is the primary text; scholarship is read here as contrast, not confirmation. On the project as a whole the received view holds (Matual 1992; Wilson 1988): Tolstoy’s gospel is a deliberately de-supernaturalized, ethics-first rendering, and the Lord’s Prayer is a sharp specimen of it. Where this dive can be checked against text-critical scholarship, two of Tolstoy’s choices stand up better than his own later self-criticism (“artificial and probably incorrect philological explanations”) would suggest:

• The Luke “Holy Spirit” reading is real, not invented. Tolstoy’s footnote claims the variant comes from “ancient church writers”; standard scholarship confirms it — «да сойдет дух твой в нас и очистит нас» corresponds to the Lukan variant ἐλθέτω τὸ πνεῦμά σου τὸ ἅγιον… καὶ καθαρισάτω ἡμᾶς, attested in minuscules 700 and 162, in Marcion’s Luke (c. 150 CE), and expressly in Gregory of Nyssa, who says Luke has “Holy Spirit” where Matthew has “kingdom.” Tolstoy chose a textually marginal but genuinely ancient reading because its pneumatology matched his own. (Wikipedia, Textual variants in the Gospel of Luke / Minuscule 700; etimasthe.com on Gregory of Nyssa.)
• The “necessary bread” reading follows a recognized etymology. His rejection of насущный (“daily”) for ἐπιούσιος, and his gloss “that which gives existence,” track the ἐπί + οὐσία derivation that also produced Jerome’s Vulgate supersubstantialem (Matthew). The word is a hapax across surviving Greek, and “necessary for existence / supersubstantial” is one of the two main scholarly lines. (Standard reference on ἐπιούσιος.)

Where the dive extends the literature is the prayer’s role as Tolstoy’s internal proof: he treats the phrase-by-phrase fit of the prayer to his twelve chapters as evidence the structure was the teaching’s own — a claim that is rhetorical, not text-critical, and is rarely examined as such. And his reading of the model prayer as the abolition of prayer — grounded in Matt 6:7–8 — is a stronger anti-liturgical move than the general “rationalist gospel” label usually conveys.

Material not covered

• No line-by-line collation of the published English/French against the Russian. The Crowell 1896 Gospels in Brief (the twelve-fold table and the recitable prayer) and the French Abrégé are quoted as period parallels, not collated; the Crowell text is from page-image OCR and is treated as reference-grade, not byte-verified (only the Russian is byte-verified).
• The Wiener 1904 and Walter Scott 1895–96 renderings of the prayer are not extracted here; the parent gospel-translation dive owns the English-lineage question.
• The Greek-column apparatus of the full harmony (Tolstoy prints Tischendorf’s Greek above his Russian) is described but not transcribed.
• The long Reuss quotation Tolstoy embeds in the Matthew chapter (the French exegete Édouard Reuss on the prayer, which Tolstoy quotes at length and partly against) is noted but not mined — it is Reuss’s voice, not Tolstoy’s.
• Swedish reception. No published Swedish translation of Tolstoy’s prayer was sought or collated; the Swedish here is this dive’s own. The broader question of Tolstoy’s gospel work in Swedish is flagged in the parent dive’s notCovered.

Visual & manuscript record

This is a text dive; no new images were fetched. The relevant public-domain visuals are held by the parent gospel-translation dive (Tolstoy in 1880, the year of the work; the autograph imprimatur; the Crowell/Walter Scott title pages). The autograph manuscript pages of the harmony’s prayer chapters, held by the State Tolstoy Museum, are not openly available and would have to be requested — the same gap the parent dive records.

Method

Scope (a focused follow-up to the gospel-translation dive, confirmed from the reader’s framing): extract and translate Tolstoy’s own renderings of the Lord’s Prayer across Tom 24; read the 1880–81 diaries and letters for his reactions during composition; and produce a Swedish «Fader vår» of his version. The textual core was extracted from the already-verified parent extracts of the full harmony (Соединение и перевод четырёх Евангелий) and the Gospel in Brief (Краткое изложение Евангелия), sliced into focused Lord’s-Prayer extracts. The composition-year reactions came from a fresh fan-out sweep of the Tom 63 letters and the Tom 49 (1881) diary; finalists were extracted and byte-checked.

A tooling note: the 1880 Tom 63 letters are encoded with pre-reform <choice><orig>/<reg> orthographic pairs that extract_tei.py drops (the known pre-reform gap), gutting the text. They were re-extracted with a small <reg>-resolving helper (extracts/_reg_extract.py) that prefers the regularized reading, giving Tolstoy’s words in modern orthography consistent with the rest of the corpus. Every Russian quotation was then checked byte-for-byte against its named extract by verify_quotes.py. The French Abrégé was read from TEI; the period English from the Crowell 1896 page-image OCR (reference-grade only). Two text-critical facts (the Luke 11:2 “Holy Spirit” variant; the ἐπιούσιος hapax) were verified against standard scholarship via a light web sweep. Swedish and English are this dive’s own working renderings, explicitly labelled.

Links: parent dive — the gospel-translation project; siblings — the fire metaphor (the burning-room register; Luke 12:49), the Jubilee Edition & TEI corpus (where Tom 24 lives), the crisis (the «переворот» behind the turn to the Gospels).

References

Primary — L. N. Tolstoy, Полное собрание сочинений (Jubilee Edition, 90 vols): Соединение и перевод четырёх Евангелий, Краткое изложение Евангелия, Abrégé de l’Évangile (Tom 24, publ. 1957); Letters to N. N. Strakhov, A. A. Tolstaya, A. A. Fet, V. I. Alekseev (Tom 63, 1880–81); Diary (Tom 49, 1881). English period parallel: The Gospels in Brief (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1896, anonymous).

Background — David Matual, Tolstoy’s Translation of the Gospels: A Critical Study (Edwin Mellen, 1992); A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (1988); Textual variants in the Gospel of Luke and Minuscule 700 (Wikipedia, accessed 2026); “Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa” (etimasthe.com, 2018); standard reference on ἐπιούσιος (hapax; Vulgate supersubstantialem). Traditional Swedish text: Fader vår per the 1917 års kyrkobibel / Swedish liturgical use.

Companion dev-blog note: website/src/posts/notes/2026-06-06-lords-prayer.md (draft). Machine-readable dossier: dossier.yaml.