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“I chose this because most of us have read War and Peace, but many of us are less familiar with Tolstoy’s later life when he stressed his pacifist convictions in the most absolute of terms. There is a tendency to regard this as a personal development of Tolstoy’s which was almost out of keeping with what came before. But if you go back to his early experiences in the Caucasus and the Crimea as a young man in the 1840s, when he began to write about war – he reported from Sevastopol during the Crimean war – you already find in him a spirit of questioning the meaning of war, and why people are prepared to kill each other, which he continues to explore in War and Peace and which leads him eventually to his pacifist position.” Read more...
John Gittings, Journalist
