In Memory of Leo Tolstoy

It was 110 years ago today that Count Lev Nikolayevich (Leo) Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer, died at the age of 82, a month younger than I am now—and except for the mustache, my covid-19 pandemic beard now looks much like his as seen in the following picture taken near the end of his life. 

Remembering Tolstoy as a Novelist

Leo Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828, about 200 kilometers south of Moscow. The third son of a landowning aristocrat, he inherited an estate consisting of a huge manor house and property with nearly 500 serfs.

After spending his young manhood in profligacy, in 1851 he joined the Russian army. He was an artillery officer during the Crimean War and was a part of the forces the British light brigade charged against, as described in my Oct. 20 post.

Reacting negatively toward that war, Tolstoy left the army and after traveling around Europe for a while, he began founding schools for peasant children in Russia. During the 1850s, even while still a soldier, he began to write novellas.

In the next decade, then, Tolstoy became a full-fledged novelist. War and Peace, his first, and very long and complicated, major novel, was published in 1869. It was followed by another lengthy novel, Anna Karenina, published in 1878.

Tolstoy wrote many novellas and literary works of many kinds, but his only other major novel was Resurrection, which was not published until 1899. Yes, with just three major works, and the third not widely read, Tolstoy is still recognized as one of the best novelists the world has ever seen.

Remembering Tolstoy as a Christian

Although baptized and brought up in the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy wrote that by the age of 18 he had “lost all belief in what I had been taught.” Those are words from Confession (1882), the book he wrote in his early 50s about becoming a follower of Jesus Christ.

So, for the last 30 years of his life, Tolstoy lived and wrote as a Christian believer—but not as a member of the Orthodox Church, which, in fact, excommunicated him in 1901.

Tolstoy’s writings during those years were largely of a man who sought to follow the teachings of Jesus, especially as found in the Sermon on the Mount.

Selections of Tolstoy’s Christian writings are published in a 325-page book under the title The Gospel in Tolstoy (2015), and I much enjoyed reading that book this fall.

“My Way to Faith,” the fourth chapter, is an excerpt from Confession in which Tolstoy wrote, “As long as I know God, I live.” Also, “To know God and to live come to one and the same thing. God is life.”

Chapter 20 is “What Is the Meaning of Life?” from one of Tolstoy’s most theological writings, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894).

Remembering Tolstoy as a Teacher 

Although Tolstoy was never a teacher in a formal sense, through his writings some of the world’s best-known people, and a multitude of unknown people, have learned important lessons from him.

Tolstoy became an important teacher for Mahatma Gandhi, for Martin Luther King Jr., and for Dorothy Day. And although certainly not widely known, he was also a teacher for Nishida Tenko-san, the subject of my 2/24/13 blog post, and I encourage you to (re)read that post.

Actually, Tolstoy has had much influence in Japan and is still seen as a trustworthy teacher there. In 2018 a Japanese woman published an article titled “What Today’s Youth Can Learn From the Great Russian Writer Leo Tolstoy.” She mentions Nishida (1872~1968) in her thoughtful article.

So, even though he died 110 years ago, Tolstoy is still remembered and honored as a brilliant writer—and as one who by his life and writings taught what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

The Peril of Blind Allegiance

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

I had long known those words from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), but I didn’t realize until doing research for my May 10 blog article on Florence Nightingale that that “charge” was during an October 1854 battle in the Crimean War. 

By Richard Caton Woodville, Jr. (1894)

The Battle of Balaklava

The Crimean War was waged between October 1853 and February 1856. It was between the Russians on one side and the British, French, and Ottoman Turks on the other.

A major event in the war was the siege of Sevastopol, the home of a major fleet of Russian ships and currently the largest city in Crimea. The siege lasted for nearly a year beginning on September 25, 1854.

Balaclava, now a part of the city of Sevastopol, was the site of the calamitous charge of the British light brigade on October 25.

It was calamitous (according to this article), for the British cavalry charged “needlessly to their doom under the muddled and misinformed orders of their superiors.”

The British Light Brigade

A brigade is a military unit and the “light brigade” in the battle of Balaklava was the British cavalry force mounted on light, fast horses that were unarmored.

On that fateful day in October 1854, the light brigade was missent to attack a Russian artillery battery for which they were ill-equipped to confront, and the assault ended with very high British casualties.

Just a little over six weeks later, Tennyson’s poem was published, and it said of the light brigade,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred.

The Peril of Blind Allegiance

Tennyson’s powerful poem seems to glorify the bravery of the cavalrymen. But doesn’t it also point out the peril of blind allegiance? Why should they be praised for riding into “the valley of Death” even though they knew “Someone had blundered”?

Blind allegiance is a characteristic of those who become followers of a cult, defined as “a group of people with extreme dedication to a certain leader or set of beliefs that are often expressed as an excessive and misplaced admiration for someone or something.”

One of the best-known examples of a cult and the destructiveness of blind allegiance is that of the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones.

In November 1978, over 900 people of that cult who had moved with Jones to Jonestown, Guyana, literally “drank the Kool-Aid” (which was really Flavor Aid) in an act of mass murder/suicide. This was an act of blind allegiance that was much more deadly than that of the British light brigade in 1854.

A religious cult with vastly more members, but much less destructive to this point, is the Unification Church which was founded in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon in South Korea.

Steven Hassan, who was 19 at the time, joined the Unification Church in 1974. A few years later he left that group, and following the Jonestown mass suicide and murders, in 1979 Hassan founded a non-profit organization called "Ex-Moon Inc." He has been fighting cults ever since.

Last year Hassan published a book titled The Cult of Trump. (There can be and are political cults as well as religious ones.) 

There are, naturally, those who object to referring to DJT’s most ardent followers as being part of a Trump cult. (See here, for example.)

Still, a majority (55%) of Republicans for whom Fox News is their primary news source say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval (bolding added; from PRRI on 10/19). That sounds very much like what members of a cult would say.

To such people I want to say, Beware of the peril of blind allegiance. You need to reason why and not be willing just to do and die.

Thank God for Nurses!

The recently maligned (by DJT) World Health Organization has designated 2020 as “Year of the Nurse,” marking 200 years since the birth of Florence Nightingale (FN). This post is my third this year about an outstanding woman born in 1820, the other two being Susan B. Anthony and Fanny Crosby.  

Learning about FN

In preparation for writing this article, I read Florence Nightingale the Angel of the Crimea, first published in 1909. The author of that old book is Laura E. Richards, whose mother was Julia Ward Howe.

Julia, who is best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ was born less than a year before FN and died just over two months after FN died 110 years ago in August 1910—and the two women knew each other to some degree. I was unable to find out whether Laura (1850~1943) also knew Florence personally.

According to Laura, it was her father, Samuel G. Howe, who in 1843 encouraged Florence to enter nursing at a time when, except for the Catholic Sisters of Charity, nurses in England “were for the most part coarse and ignorant women, often cruel, often intemperate” (p. 35).

Laura’s book, said to be “a story for young people,” was certainly a hagiographical account of Nightingale, but I much enjoyed reading it. Nearly three-fourths of the book is about FN’s meritorious work during the Crimean War (1854~56). 

The Influence of FN

Florence felt God’s call to service of others in 1837 when she was 17 years old, and then she became a nursing student in 1844. After several years of courtship, in 1849 she declined a marriage proposal. Four years later she became the superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London.

In the spring of 1854, Britain and France joined Turkey in opposition to Russia in what became known as the Crimean War. In the fall of that year, Florence went with a party of 38 nurses to work in a hospital in Scutari, Turkey, where thousands of injured soldiers were being cared for—and where a large percentage of them were dying.

When Florence and the other nurses arrived in Scutari, they were not welcomed. According to Richards, “the military authorities did not want female nurses,” because as mentioned earlier, nurses at that time were “often drunken, generally unfeeling, and always ignorant” (p. 52).

But Florence began to implement significant changes. One of the patients there when she arrived wrote, “Everything changed for the better.”

According to an essay about Florence’s legacy, because of her work in Scutari and her subsequent teaching, FN “will forever be linked with modern nursing—and rightly so.”

The same essay says that three areas of contemporary medicine were “deeply influenced by her.” Those three were hospital infection control, hospital epidemiology, and hospice medicine.

Following in the Footsteps of FN

After retiring as a teacher/administrator in Japan and moving to the Kansas City area in 2005, I had the privilege of teaching a required theology course at Rockhurst University from 2006 to 2015. My classes in sixteen of those seventeen semesters were in the evening, and a majority of my students were in the nursing program.

With few exceptions, those nursing students were serious, hard-working students, and I wonder now how they are faring as practicing nurses during the current pandemic. I am quite confident that many of my former students are a part of the dedicated core of nurses ministering to covid-19 patients across the country.

I hope they all are all right, but some might not be. According to a recent report by the National Nursing Associations (see the reference in this article), at least 90,000 healthcare workers have been infected with covid-19 and more than 260 nurses have died.

The nursing students I taught (and all dedicated nurses) are following in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale, and I write this to honor them (and all nurses) this week, which is National Nurses Week. This special week begins each year on May 6 and ends on May 12, FN’s birthday.

Thank God for Florence Nightingale, and thank God for nurses!