A voice seemed to cry within me, ‘This is He, He without whom there is no life. To know God and to live are one. God is life.’
Live to seek God, and life will not be without God. And stronger than ever rose up life within and around me, and the light that then shone never left me again.” – Leo Tolstoy, My Confession (1882)
Leo Nikolayevitch Tolstoy (1828-1910) was the only writer who could get Ernest Hemingway to voluntarily relinquish his self-appointed seat at the head of the table of the greatest fiction writers of all time. In his 1950 interview with Lillian Ross in The New Yorker, Hemingway said:
I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendahl, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”
Perhaps the reason that Tolstoy seems to tower over all other fiction writers is simply because there are very few respectable, scholarly lists of “the greatest novels of all time” that do not place both War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878) in the “top five” of whatever list you are looking at. I highlight this fact only to emphasize the monumental literary achievement of one particular novelist, Leo Tolstoy, someone who pretty much “walked away” from writing fiction (after the publication of Anna Karenina) so as to devote his remaining years to writing about what was going on within himself – on a philosophical, moral, and spiritual level.
Of course, such a bold, determined, decision – coming from such a literary giant as Tolstoy – sent shock waves through the international literary community. On July 27, 1883, thirty-eight days before his own death, Ivan Turgenev, another great Russian writer, wrote to Tolstoy, imploring his friend: “Turn back to literature! That is your real gift. Great poet of our Russian land, hear my plea!” But Tolstoy never heeded his friend’s plea. It wasn’t mere vanity, or intellectual curiosity, that had Tolstoy shift his focus from literature to a personal search for God. On the contrary, Tolstoy was inexplicably drawn to a deep, inward reflection of his faith, and inner consciousness – in spite of the fact that it was against his will.
Tolstoy’s was a mid-life existential crisis – and faith, not reason, ultimately saved him from his depressing thoughts (at that time) that life was meaningless, and that suicide was the only answer:
This search after a God was not an act of my reason, but a feeling, and I say this advisedly, because it was opposed to my way of thinking; it came from the heart.”
What I find most interesting of all, was that Tolstoy came to realize that the answers he was looking for were not to be found in his private circle of intellectual, affluent friends – but among the common peasants whose faith in God was more unshakable than the most compelling voices of “reason” that God did not exist. “The whole life of the believers of the people was a confirmation of the meaning of life which their faith gave them,” Tolstoy observed of the poor, faithful masses.
What personally drew me to this pivotal, transformational point of Leo Tolstoy’s life is how reflective it was of my own transition from “would-be” fiction writer to a writer of personal and spiritual growth books. Of course, the most glaring difference between our histories is the word would-be. Whereas Tolstoy had more than proven himself as a master of the epic novel, I merely have a footlocker filled with several unfinished manuscripts of novels, a half-dozen short stories, and one completed (and one uncompleted) screenplay. Where I can totally relate to Tolstoy’s final years as a writer is in his decision to rethink the substance, and direction, of his writing. Novel writing did not fulfill him as a writer. It left him empty, and depressed.
As a would-be novelist, I had a very similar moment of truth when I felt a deep calling within me to write The Pono Principle. I suddenly came to the conclusion that fiction writing for me was strictly an ego-fulfilling goal. It was my dream to envision my books being read in university courses around the world, and to be compared to the other great novelists throughout history. The dream was all ego driven. I believe this is also what Tolstoy concluded after becoming a famous novel writer. “During that time I began to write, out of vanity, love of gain, and pride,” he admitted. “How often while writing have I cudgeled my brains to conceal under the mask of indifference or pleasantry those yearnings for something better which formed the real thought of my life.”
When looking back upon his writer’s ego, and that of his fellow prolific writers of his day, Tolstoy says,
We were all then convinced that it behooved us to speak, to write, and to print as fast as we could, as much as we could, and that on this depended the welfare of the human race. . . . Quite unconscious that we ourselves knew nothing, that to the simplest of all problems in life – what is right and what is wrong – we had no answer.”
There you have it – even after having reached the pinnacle of literary success, his writer’s ego telling him that the world’s “welfare” depended on his work, Tolstoy came to the sobering conclusion that, if he didn’t even have the answers to life’s simplest problems – like what is right (i.e. Pono) – then his literary success was meaningless.
Since my early 20s, I had a dream of being the next Ernest Hemingway, a writer of great novels and short stories. Those who read my work, over the years – my wife, my closest friends – were very encouraging that I pursue my dream of being a writer of fiction. University professors told me that I had true writing talent. My mother’s dying wish was that I write because “there is greatness there.” So, when I reached a point in my life, where I felt a deep inner compulsion to dedicate myself to writing a personal growth book called The Pono Principle, imagine the shock waves that hit those closest to me who had, for decades, encouraged me to pursue my dream of being a fiction writer. Their collective response mirrored Turgenev’s plea to Tolstoy.
But, like Tolstoy, I have journeyed within myself as a writer, and have concluded that The Pono Principle may not have been the book that I would have ever expected myself to write – but I am now confident that it is certainly the book I was destined to write. This “journey within,” where we reach a pivotal moment when we start asking ourselves the crucial questions of life, is the subject of my newest book, the one that I am writing now. Leo Tolstoy’s personal search for meaning, and for God, set him on a pathway within himself – away from the external false sense of fame and fortune that brought him no comfort, no meaning, and no answers to life – to a place where he found all of the answers already waiting for him.
Tolstoy’s philosophical treatise, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), “left an abiding impression” upon a young protester named Mohandas Gandhi (living in South Africa at the time), who listed the book as one of the three most important influences in his life. For the record, the other two books were neither War and Peace nor Anna Karenina.
