RECIPE OF CREATIVITY BY LEV TOLSTOY IN THE RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY OF THE LATE XIX - BEGINNING OF THE XX CENTURY

Abstract

This article presents an analysis the philosophical and religious views of the outstanding Russian writer Lev Tolstoy and examines the influence of his work on the philosophy of the Silver Age. The ambiguity and inconsistency of many ideas of Tolstoy’s legacy is emphasized. The features of Tolstoy’s understanding of the meaning of life and the purpose of man, faith and reason, the nature of good and evil, love, non-violence and violence are considered.The interpretation and attitude to the fundamental Tolstoy’s ideas on the part of D. Merezhkovsky, V. Solovyov, N. Berdyaev, L. Shestov, S. Frank, I. Ilyin, highlighted the general and distinctive in the assessment of the philosophical concept of Tolstoy.In general, positively assessing the writer’s artistic heritage and the high moral bar of his moral teaching, Russian thinkers criticized his religious and philosophical pursuits for inconsistency, excessive rationalization and contradiction, in particular, they assessed Tolstoy’s metaphysics of evil and his idea of non-resistance. Also, the representatives of the philosophy of the Silver Age were not satisfied with Tolstoy’s interpretation of Christian doctrine, which they considered erroneous.Tolstoy’s creativity became the foundation and starting point for further research into the philosophy of the Silver Age, because the range of problems that was considered by Tolstoy was the reason for such currents and trends such as «search for God», «new idealism», «new religious consciousness», etc.