The Gospel in Brief

ISBN-13: 9780803294325 / Angielski / Miękka / 1997 / 215 str.

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy; Luisa Cesana; F. A. Flowers

Opis

Are you acquainted with Tolstoy s The Gospel in Brief? At its time, this book virtually kept me alive. . . . If you are not acquainted with it, then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker.The Gospel in Brief is Leo Tolstoy s integration of the four biblical Gospels into a single account of the life of Jesus. Inspired in large measure by Tolstoy s meticulous study of the original Greek versions of the Bible, The Gospel in Brief is a highly original fusion of biblical texts and Tolstoy s own influential religious views.Tolstoy explains that his goal is a solution to the problem of life, not an answer to theological or historical questions. As a result, he sets aside such issues as Jesus genealogy and divinity, or whether Jesus in fact walked on water. Instead, he focuses on the words and teachings of Jesus, stripped of what Tolstoy regarded as the Church s distortions and focus on dogma and ritual. The result is a work that emphasizes the individual s spiritual condition in a chaotic and indifferent world.Like Tolstoy s celebrated literary achievements, The Gospel in Brief has the distinct bearing of a classic: in its urgency and directness it is remarkably current, as if it were written only yesterday rather than a century ago."

O autorze

Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defence of Sebastopol he wrote The Sebastopol Sketches (1855-6), which established his reputation. After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana, he married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness; they had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a spiritual crisis in his life; he became an extreme moralist and in a series of pamphlets after 1880 expressed his rejection of state and church, indictment of the weaknesses of the flesh and denunciation of private property. His teaching earned him numerous followers at home and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommuincated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramamtic flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.