Leo Tolstoy on Plato and Platonism

Abstract

Leo Tolstoy was not a philosopher, yet he was an avid reader of philosophy and a profound thinker. He himself pointed out the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Arthur Schopenhauer on his thinking. What is less known is the impact of Plato’s thought and legacy on Tolstoy. He frequently read Plato and was under the sway of the broadly conceived Platonist tradition. In this article, we explore this connection between Tolstoy and Plato, because it can teach us something important not only about Tolstoy, Plato, and Platonism, but also about our current predicament. At the beginning, we establish the dichotomy between Tolstoy the artist and Tolstoy the thinker, and in what follows, we focus on identifying the influences of Plato and Platonism on Tolstoy. We illustrate these in Tolstoy’s famous works, like Ana Karenina and War and Peace. Afterwards, we outline Tolstoy’s interpretation of Platonism and explain how Tolstoy accepted it and incorporated it into a broader Christian context. In the final part of the article, we also articulate the important differences between Plato’s and Tolstoy’s Platonism.