April 17, 2025

By Jim Towey

Raising five kids and holding jobs bigger than my capabilities made casual reading for most of my adult life virtually impossible. I had to wait until the kids were grown to begin to discover the classics of literature. I also must grudgingly acknowledge that the Covid pandemic and our government’s foolish embrace of lockdowns, shutdowns, and showdowns over masks and social distancing, freed up huge blocks of time for me to spend in the recliner. That’s where I became a friend and admirer of Leo Tolstoy.

When I was in college and in the bachelor years of my early professional life, I certainly had heard of Tolstoy and his great works. But I assiduously avoided them. It is said you should never judge a book by its cover, which is true. I, however, judged a book by its thickness and that made Tolstoy’s works a non-starter. My hairline was receding at the time and I thought that if I began one of his classics, I’d be bald by the time I finished. A Word counter reports that War and Peace weighs in at 587,287 words, and Anna Karenina at 349,736. That was a lot to ask of a person afraid of commitment. I was more of an Animal Farm kind of guy, Orwell’s more manageable classic of under 30,000 words. Either way I ended up bald.

But when the world went crazy with Covid, when local health officials did to Fauci orders what the gain-of-function researchers in Wuhan did to the coronavirus, by mandating the removal of rakes from sand traps on my public golf course – I was driven into the arms of War and Peace.

I wish I had gone there 20 years ago when I entered academia. I used to joke with the faculty that I was a big fan of Tolstoy, but that Toy Story 2 was better. It always got a laugh and masked the fact that I was such a poorly read college president. But now I am on the Tolstoy train, resolved to read everything he wrote.

A Confession confession

This led me to A Confession, his short autobiography written a year after Anna K was published and during his own existential crisis. He had been a gambler, drinker, womanizer, thief and had even killed men in battle. Despite his wealth, fame, mostly happy marriage, 13 children, and prodigious talent, he was utterly miserable, oppressed by what he termed “the senselessness of life.” He was beset by nagging questions like, “What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything? Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

Suicidal ideation stalked him without mercy. He was careful not to have a rope in his study. But he didn’t end his life. “Something else was also working which I can only call a consciousness of life.” The remainder of A Confession recounts his spiritual awakening and embrace of Christian theology (while eschewing organized religion). By the end of his life, he had given away most of his wealth and become a poor wayfarer, practicing the teachings of Christ in a radical fashion. The Tolstoy 1 of despair grew into the Tolstoy 2 who revered life and all of creation.

Suffering and suicide

Thank God he did not choose to end his life when all seemed dark. Otherwise, we would not have Resurrection, Death of Ivan Ilyich, Alyosha the Pot, and many other masterpieces of his. Misery can tempt anyone to commit suicide. Indeed, the argument in favor of the legalization of assisted suicide leans heavily on the plight of those enduring untreated or untreatable pain, both physical and even mental (as in Tolstoy’s case). A study of the high incidence of suicide in Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners were encouraged to end their lives, confirms the correlation between intense suffering and suicide.

One Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, landed where Tolstoy did. Frankl wrote in his memoir of his experiences, in Man’s Search for Meaning, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”

Passover and Easter

This week, Jews celebrate their deliverance from the Pharoah’s tyranny by God’s mighty hand, and Christians commemorate the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday and how death does not have the final word. These remembrances challenge us to alleviate suffering and misery wherever we find it, particularly at the end of life when patients often cry out in their agony. Suicide was not a good solution for Tolstoy’s pain. It is not for any of us, particularly those who face serious illness. Human beings deserve our best efforts that honor life and even suffering.

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)