Tolstoy Inspiration For TodayBy Professor Andy Kaufman
How Tolstoy Changed My Life
“If I were told that what I write will be read by today’s children in twenty years and that they will cry and laugh over it and love life, then I would devote my entire life and all my strength to such a work!”
Tolstoy was not just a great writer. He was also a great and inspirational teacher of life. Probably the greatest lesson about life that I have learned from reading him is that it doesn’t matter if you lived in Russia in the 1800’s or in America in 2004. Human nature is the same everywhere, and it hasn’t changed. I learned this lesson in a very personal way when I first discovered Tolstoy seventeen years ago as a freshman at Amherst College.
I was going through a difficult time in my life. I had just moved from Michigan, where I grew up in the small town of Muskegon, to Amherst, Massachusetts. It felt as if I had been thrown into a foreign environment. The East Coast college world felt cold and competitive to me. I felt like everybody was smarter than I was. I felt like everybody was better prepared for college than I was. And I felt like there were social rules, which everybody seemed to understand except for me—what to do, how to speak, how to approach women. I felt awkward and bumbling. I was searching for myself, for who I was, for what was important to me in life.
It was in this stage of anxiety and insecurity that I was assigned to read a book for an English class: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. When I first saw the book in the bookstore, I was terrified! I had never even seen a book this big in my life (except for the dictionary). And I had to read it?! I was intimidated, like many people are when they first encounter the large Russian novels. But something amazing happened. As I started to read this book, the world that Tolstoy created from the very first page was so real and vivid to me and the characters were so full of life that I completely forgot about the fact that I had five hundred, a thousand pages, to go. I was utterly absorbed in the moment-to-moment experience that Tolstoy was creating.
There was one character in particular, with whom I fully identified: Pierre Bezukhov. At the beginning of the novel Pierre is young, he’s insecure, he’s socially awkward, and he’s on a philosophical quest for meaning. Pierre was essentially me. I had discovered myself in Tolstoy’s novel. That made me realize that Tolstoy could become for me something more than just a writer I had to read for an English class, or even a so-called “great writer.” Reading Tolstoy could become for me self-therapy. I could learn about myself and work through my own problems by living through the experiences of Tolstoy’s characters.
That was the beginning of my long journey with Tolstoy. I began to appreciate that, even though thousands of miles separate our two countries and over a century separates today from Tolstoy’s time, human beings basically go through the same experiences everywhere. That was a very comforting lesson for me, especially as a young man at that stage in my life.
Tolstoy’s Ideas Live
Even though I am now considered a Tolstoy “expert,” my love for Tolstoy’s art remains deeply personal. Every time I stand before a class or an audience today to talk about him, I still experience that innocent excitement and respectful trepidation of the young Midwestern boy who encountered the author for the very time some seventeen years ago. I have read Anna Karenina about ten times, and it still feels fresh to me. Tolstoy’s writing has wisdom, innocence, and purity that touch me to the core every time.
Studying Tolstoy has helped me to become a more compassionate person. Tolstoy has taught me that it is not the grand gestures, but the small ones, that determine the quality of my relationship with those around me. The smallest kindness can make a world of difference in another person’s life. I always try to remember that. I look for opportunities to deliver small kindnesses to my family and friends, to the man who serves me my coffee, and to the stranger on the street. It is not always easy to remember to do these things, and I often don’t measure up. Still, I keep striving towards this goal, and in the very striving itself, I find that my life has more meaning. Every day I try to live more and more like Tolstoy lived and wrote—with courage, compassion, and sincerity.
“Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which human beings have risen.”
TOP
|
 |
