My Religion

In this searching and uncompromising spiritual work, Leo Tolstoi emerges as both a towering Russian novelist and a radical moral thinker, renowned for Childhood and Youth, The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Anna Karenin. The book grows out of his lifelong rejection of aristocratic emptiness and his admiration for simplicity, virtue, and inward seriousness, presenting My Religion as the culmination of his artistic and ethical development. Tolstoi recounts his own conversion from nihilism to the teachings of Jesus, a change that brought him peace, clarity, and a new sense of right and wrong. At the heart of the book is a direct, urgent reading of Christ's words, especially "Resist not evil," which Tolstoi takes as a plain command to renounce violence, self-interest, and the false security of institutions, wealth, and status. He argues that the true "light within" is reason and conscience, and that people have been trained to ignore it through dogma, philosophy, and social habit. Through parable, moral reflection, and fierce criticism of church complacency, he calls for repentance, self-denial, brotherhood, and a life lived now—not deferred to another world. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.