Many scholars and critics have maintained that Tolstoy, while a great writer, is a poor thinker, a mere amateur in philosophy. My chapter suggests that this venerable cliché of Tolstoy reception is untenable. The chapter has two parts. In the first, I discuss several philosophers with whose thinking Tolstoy engaged extensively and give a brief account of his relation to them. The main names here are well known: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Immanuel Kant. In the second part, I examine a somewhat unexpected but significant affinity Tolstoy’s fiction has with the thought of Baruch Spinoza. This affinity emerges most clearly in War and Peace. Although this section covers what is merely an affinity, it aims to show that Tolstoy’s greatest fictional work is one of the supreme artistic instantiations of an essentially Spinozist account of the world.

Tolstoy had a sustained interest in a number of religions other than Christianity. This interest became urgent and comprehensive in the 1880s after his so-called conversion. In this chapter, I examine Tolstoy’s relation to Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism in terms of a crucial question that preoccupied the later Tolstoy: What is the good life? Indeed, I suggest that Tolstoy turned to these other religions precisely because of his concern to identify a universal wisdom about the good life. My examination proceeds through texts, such as War and Peace and A Confession, that exploit tropes, imagery, and parables drawn from Daoism, Buddhism, and the Hindu tradition. The upshot is to reveal the extent to which Tolstoy’s advocacy of self-resignation, the principal element in his attitude to nonviolent resistance, has roots in his investigation of these other religions, and not only in his interpretation of the Christian tradition.