This was Leo Tolstoy’s last major work. With it, he fulfilled
a dream he had nourished for almost fifteen years, that of “collecting the
wisdom of the centuries in one book” meant for a general audience. Tolstoy put
a huge amount of effort into its creation, preparing three revised editions between
1904 and 1910. It was his own favorite everyday reading, a book he would turn
to regularly for the rest of his life.
The original idea for this work appeared to come to
Tolstoy in the mid-1880s. His first recorded expression of the concept of A
Calendar of Wisdom — “A wise thought for every day of the year, from the
greatest philosophers of all times and all people” — came in 1884. He wrote in
his diary on March 15 of that year: “I have to create a circle of reading for
myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament.
This is also necessary for all people.”
In 1885, he wrote in a letter to his assistant, Mr.
Chertkov: “I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness
to communicate with such great thinkers as Socrates, Epictetus, Arnold, Parker.
. . . They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning
of life and about virtue. . . . I would like to create a book . . . in which I
could tell a person about his life, and about the Good Way of Life.”
The process of collecting these thoughts took over fifteen
years. Tolstoy began writing between December 1902 and January 1903. Then in
his late seventies, he had fallen seriously ill; while meditating about the
meaning of life and death, he was inspired to begin compiling what he then called
A Wise Thought for Every Day. When he finally sent the book to his
publisher, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “I felt that I have been elevated to great
spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people
whose books I read and whose thoughts I selected for my Circle of Reading.”
He would often return in his diary to meditate upon this
book, repeating variants of “What can be more precious than to communicate
every day with the wisest men of the world?” Tolstoy carefully selected the
contributors to this volume, “among the very best writers,” as he repeated to
his colleagues and friends. They represented a wide variety of philosophical
views, ethnic backgrounds, and historical periods: “It will be a big surprise
to the readers,” Tolstoy wrote, “that together with Kant and other famous thinkers,
they will find in my book thoughts by Lucy Malory, an unknown journalist from
the United States, from Oregon.”
The first edition appeared in 1904 under the title Thoughts
of Wise Men. It saw three editions during Tolstoy’s lifetime, between l904
and 1910, each published under a different subtitle: The Way of Life, Circle
of Reading, and A Wise Thought for Every Day. Between 1904 and 1907,
Tolstoy worked on the enlarged and completely revised second edition, from
which this, its first English translation, is drawn.
In mid-August 1905 he wrote the introduction that follows
and noted in his diary: “I have revised and enlarged my Calendar, now it is twice
as big. For two months I did not read anything else, neither newspapers nor
magazines, and I felt so good. . . . I became more and more astonished by the
ignorance, and especially by the cultural, moral ignorance of our society . . .
All our education should be directed to the accumulation of the cultural
heritage of our ancestors, the best thinkers of the world.”
The major difference between the first edition (Thoughts
of Wise Men) and the second (A Calendar of Wisdom) was that Tolstoy
now grouped the thoughts according to topics for a certain day, week and month.
He wrote on June 3, 1904, in his diary: “I am busy with the Circle of
Reading . . . I cannot do anything else . . . I have selected thoughts and
grouped them into the following major topics: God, Intellect, Law, Love, Divine
Nature of Mankind, Faith, Temptations, Word, Self-Sacrifice, Eternity, Good, Kindness,
Unification of People (with God), Prayer, Freedom, Perfection, Work, etc.”
Tolstoy added about eight hundred of his own thoughts,
written during his many years of meditation, or taken from previous diary
entries. He generally started each day with an opening thought of his own,
added quotes by other sources, and finished each day with a closing thought of
his own.
Additionally, he wrote a short story, or vignette, three
to ten pages in length for the end of every week. Each story corresponded to
that week’s moral, philosophical, or religious topic; he prepared fifty-two
stories in all and called The Sunday Reading Stories.
The majority of these fifty-two stories were written by
Tolstoy especially for this work; the rest were selected and adapted from
writings by Plato, Buddha, Dostoevski, Pascal, Leskov, Chekhov, and others. Tolstoy’s
prose style in these Sunday Reading Stories is very different from the
sophistication of his earlier novels.
These stories, which were later greatly admired by
Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, were written in a clear, simple, almost primitive language,
designed, as they were, for a wide and general audience. In them, Tolstoy
combined simplicity of form and philosophical depth. Because these stories did
not appear in all editions, and because they are as a whole quite long, they do
not appear in this edition.
On December 21, 1904, after reading the galley proofs of
the second edition called The Calendar: The Circle of Reading for Every Day,
Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “During this last day I have descended from the spiritual
and moral heights where I was all this time when I communicated with the best
and wisest thinkers of the world when I created my Circle of Reading.”
This title was changed in the second revised edition,
published in 1905-1907, to Wise Thoughts by Many Writers on Truth, Life, and
Behavior Collected and Arranged for Every Day of the Year by Leo Tolstoy.
From its first publication, the book was always present on Tolstoy’s desk; it
became his favorite book during the last five years of his life.
Every day, from 1905 to 1910, he read thoughts presented
in the book for the corresponding day of the year, and he recommended the same
habit to all his friends. On May 16, 1908, he wrote to a man named Gusev: “I cannot
understand how some people can live without communicating with the wisest
people who ever lived on Earth? . . . I feel very happy every day, because I
read this book.”
Tolstoy prepared a third revised, shortened, and simplified
edition which appeared in print under the new title The Way of Life in
1910, the last year of his life. He wished to make the book easily comprehensible
for even the simplest and least educated people—peasants, and children.
Most probably, Tolstoy compared A Calendar of Wisdom
to War and Peace when he wrote that “To create a book for the masses,
for millions of people . . . is incomparably more important and fruitful than
to compose a novel of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy
classes for a short time, and then is forever forgotten. The region of this art
of the simplest, most widely accessible feeling is enormous, and it is as yet
almost untouched.” Other editions appeared in Odessa and St. Petersburg in
1911-1912. A German critical edition (translated by E. Schmidt and A.
Schkarvan, Dresden: Karl Reissner, 1907) included the sources of his numerous
quotes.
An edition of A Calendar of Wisdom was published in
Russia in 1912, but after the Russian Revolution publication was forbidden
under the Soviet regime, because of the book’s spiritual orientation and its
numerous religious quotes. When it was again published in Russia
It has never before been translated into English. The first
English translation of A Calendar of Wisdom will be a real discovery for
the English-speaking reader. Created by one of the world’s greatest novelists
and thinkers to represent the very best of the world’s spiritual heritage, it
draws on the greatest works of religion, philosophy, and literature the world
has yet seen.
It belongs among the very best creations of human genius,
a work which will serve its readers as a practical spiritual guide on how to
live in peace with oneself and how to live a life filled with kindness, satisfaction
and happiness. Tolstoy’s original goal was the delivery of wisdom to the widest
possible number of people, “to entertain millions of readers.” This aim remains
as compelling now, in this time of increasing spiritual need, as it was then.
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