In his final years Leo Tolstoy wrote a series of collections of aphorisms and sayings in which his religious and moral thoughts come to fruition. The climax was reached in the year of his death (1910) with the publication of the collection entitled “The Way of Life.”His language of wisdom comprises its own little world among the works of Tolstoy, although it arose from his mystical spirituality and the expressionistic contrasts that had formed his writings since the 1870s in his many treatises critical of the moral, religious and institutional thought of his day. These contrasts include truth and deception, God and Man, soul and flesh, man and woman, death and life. As a moralist, in his long treatises Tolstoy denounced the evils of the world and human society; as a mystic he often spoke of God’s light that desires to shine in all human beings. Taken together, these thoughts make him a controversial thinker even for our day and age. And both strands come together in the language of wisdom, which dissolves the closed form of the treatise into a open collection of individual thoughts. Reading these texts is simultaneously meditative practice and the search for the proper rule of action in the respective moment in time.In the first part of this volume, Holger Kuße introduces the reader to Tolstoy’s contradictory thoughts, the language of his rigorous moral attitude and that of his collections of wise sayings. This portrayal is not limited to the content of his thoughts, but devoted also to the expression thereof. The second part deals with a selection of his thinking taken from the volume “The Way of Life” (1910).weiterlesen