SOURCE: "The Religious Tragedy of Tolstoy," in The Russian Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, April, 1960, pp. 157-70.

In the following essay, Stepun discusses the effects of religious conversion on Tolstoy's personal life.

Anyone undertaking a discussion of Tolstoy should bear in mind the words of his wife, who eight years after his death, said to one of his biographers: "For forty-eight years I lived by the side of Lev Nikolaevich and to this day do not know what sort of person he was." The enigmatic character of the great novelist, religious thinker, and social reformer may principally be explained through the bewildering number of contradictions in his nature and by his untoward tendency to make dogmatic generalizations about his multifarious probings into the spheres of life and the human spirit. It would be simple to extract characteristic quotations from his many writings and to group them in such a way...