Tolstoy and Pantagruelism

It is unlikely that Leo Tolstoy would look kindly upon the association that I am suggesting in the title of today's dispatch. But no Pantagruelist worth her salt ever heeded the advice of Dale Carnegie. Leo Tolstoy deserves mention alongside (if not entirely within) the ranks of Pantagruelists, because his personal attempt to re-invent Christianity on the basis of his own reading of the Sermon on the Mount shares a significant family resemblance with the "Philosophy of Christ" advocated by Erasmus and approved by Rabelais. Moreover, Erasmus and Rabelais agreed, in the main, with Tolstoy's pacifism: to follow Christ is to forsake violence as an option for settling conflict. Finally, Tolstoy was not the stern and humorless figure he is popularly remembered to be. Even in the late novel Hadji Murad, written after his religious awakening, Tolstoy includes a chapter in which, with withering satire, he savages the old, corrupt Czar Nicholas. As every devout Pantagruelist understands, satire does not exhaust the possibilities for comic engagement with the world, but it occupies an indispensable position in the repertoire.

Tolstoy may well have taken himself a bit too seriously when the end drew near. There is no record that, while he lay dying at the rail station of Astapovo, he had enough of his wits about him to deliver a bon mot like that attributed to Rabelais: "Draw the curtains; the farce is over!" Instead, he lay on a cot lost in delirium; in a pocket of his great coat, hung upon a peg in the wall of the station-master's office, was a copy of Allama Sir Abdullah al-Mamun al-Suhrawardy's collection of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. In that collection, one finds a fair summation of the Pantagruelist's creed:

"What actions are most excellent? To gladden the heart of a human being, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the wrongs of the injured."

This hadith, as Tolstoy might say, encompasses the "gospel in brief."