Drawing from War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Master and Man, Walk in the Light, and Twenty-Three Tales, Miriam LeBlanc's selections are each prefaced by a contextual note -- something I'm glad to see, since these literary selections are but pieces of that massive literary corpus. But readers will nonetheless find in these pages a rich, accessible sampling. Tolstoy amateurs -- like me -- will be pleased to find some of the writer's deepest, most compelling passages in one volume. I know I was.
Tolstoy himself, in his later life, rejected War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but The Death of Ivan Ilyich remained among some of his own personal favorite writing. It also contains Tolstoy's spiritual vision of Christianity in the face of the modern world's crisis of faith. But it's Resurrection and The Kingdom of God Is Within You that will forever be my own personal favorites of Tolstoy's massive collection. And I was excited to see both included here.
The Gospel in Tolstoy takes us -- much as Plough's other volume, The Gospel in Dostoevsky, does -- on the journey of Christian faith through a literary corpus: Here, from "Finding God" to "Love of Neightbor" and its embrace of "Peace and Nonviolence" and "Forgiveness" to the Kingdom's call to "Living Simply" on that journey of "The Way of the Kingdom".
It was Dostoevesky that rescued me from existentialist literary clutches of Nietzsche. But it was Tolstoy who brought me into the rich relationship religion of life with Jesus Christ. So this book is a real treasure, alongside The Gospel in Dostoevsky. A treasure, I hasten to add, that's not to be missed. Pastors, particularly, would do well to have both books on their shelves, and revisit these works again and again. There's plenty of preaching fodder here.
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I received a free copy of this book from Plough Publishing in exchange for my honest review here.