Great piece, @David_Buller. You accidentally hit upon a subject close to my heart. A couple of quick notes:
Tolstoy was a master of the short story, and those he wrote after his conversion are gathered in Divine and Human. From Amazon: “Suppressed in turn by the tzarist and Soviet regime, the tales contained in this book have, for the most part, never been published in English until now (2000).” I wouldn’t classify these stories among his greatest, but definitely an interesting read.
You mentioned Tolstoy’s unorthodox Christianity and his influence on Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., but it goes even deeper than that. One of his post-conversion works was a harmonized version of the gospels called The Gospel in Brief. Like Thomas Jefferson’s famous chopped-up Bible, Tolstoy’s version left out the miracles and, as the Amazon description puts it, “makes accessible the powerful, mystical truth of Jesus’s spiritual teaching, stripped of artificial church doctrine.”
As it turns out, Tolstoy’s short harmony of the gospels had a profound influence on modern philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein came from one of the richest families in Europe. He rejected his family’s nominal Catholicism as a young man and began studying engineering. He soon became fascinated with logic and philosophy and moved to England to study with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. He happened to be visiting home in Austria when WWI broke out, and he enlisted in the Austrian army. Stopping in a shop for a postcard, he wound up buying the only book they had for sale – The Gospel in Brief. He carried it with him everywhere during the war, to the point that the other soldiers called Wittgenstein “the Gospel Man.” During this time, he also wrote the one and only book published during his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Logical Positivists misunderstood his book to mean that nothing existed beyond what was empirically provable, but Wittgenstein actually had done the opposite and made room for religion. (An interesting article on the subject is Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism.)
When the war was over, Wittgenstein horrified his family by giving away his share of the estate. Certain that he had solved the fundamental problem of philosophy, he gave it up and became a teacher so that he could at least “teach the gospel to the children.” He was eventually persuaded that the Tractatus’ pictorial view of language was flawed, and he returned to Cambridge and philosophy in the late 1920s.
A fascinating man, a fascinating life, and possibly the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Would any of it happened without that chance encounter with Tolstoy and The Gospel in Brief?