Missionary John Hunt Arrives in Fiji, 1838

2022-12-20T13:35:40-06:00December 20, 2022|HH 2022|

“Now when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.” —Acts 14:38

Missionary John Hunt Arrives in Fiji,
December 22, 1838

Note: The grossly pagan practices mentioned here may be disturbing to some, but are the common end results of every culture that turns its back on God.

The year 1838 was auspicious in the life of John Hunt. In February he met two missionaries to the Islands of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean and heard of the rampant cannibalism there. The Wesleyan Mission House asked him to go to Fiji as a missionary, a request he accepted. On March 6, he married his longtime sweetheart, Hannah Summers, and was ordained to Gospel ministry on March 27. He and his new bride departed for Sydney, Australia on April 29. In October, the now Reverend Hunt joined fellow Methodist missionary James Calvert, arriving at Lakemba, Fiji, on December 22. Over the ten more years of life that God granted him, John Hunt and a number of fellow missionaries witnessed the cannibalization of hundreds of people and the salvation of multiple thousands.


John Hunt (1812-1848)


James Calvert (1813-1892)

John Hunt’s early life began as so many did in 19th Century England: in a moderately prosperous home, soon to be thrown into poverty. Born in 1812, the third of four children born to an illiterate country bailiff, his father lost his job, was forced to move to the city, and barely kept the family out of the almshouse till he found other work, making just enough to feed the family. John’s father often told stories late into the night of the heroism of English soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars, sparking the keen imagination of young John, who subsequently dreamed of military adventure and the dangers of the battlefield. He attended school and learned to read and write, proving to be a quick study and zealous student. From his parents he learned to pray and developed a keen sense of God’s Providence. After barely surviving a bout of “brain fever’ at age sixteen, John heard the Gospel at a Methodist Chapel and became a devout Christian; his life ambition began to change.


Fijian village of Navala in the Nausori Highlands

At nineteen he read Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and pursued a steady diet of good Christian books, from commentaries to apologetics. The ploughboy believed God called him to the Gospel ministry, and after meeting missionaries to Fiji and attending seminary classes in London, he determined to join the Methodist mission teams of the Pacific Islands. In 1838 at age twenty-six, John Hunt sailed for the Pacific. Upon reaching the Fiji Islands, he found that the missionary stories of a terrible paganism in many places were true. “Two-thirds of all children were boiled and eaten. Every village had its human butcher. Aged parents were . . . eaten by their children. A man would often cook his best wife or tender child as a feast for his closest friends . . .”


Two mountain men of Fiji


The Wesleyan Chapel in Vewa (Viwa), Fiji

Rev. Hunt and his wife were posted to Rewa, the 105-square-mile island out of the 300 islands that make up the nation of Fiji today; the island contains the capital city of Suva. By February of 1839, Hunt had learned enough of the Fiji language to begin preaching in that language. Within five months he began translating the Bible directly from Greek to Fijian. At the invitation of the King of Rewa, he established a mission at Somosomo and after three years moved to Viwa Island. Hundreds, then thousands of people embraced Christ under the preaching of John Hunt. The culture of those islands changed dramatically as cannibalism ceased, churches emerged from the pagan wreckage, and a tradition of Gospel witness continues down to this very day. The chiefs and priests did not receive the English-speaking missionaries lying down, however, and the push-back from their demon-based religious leaders took the form of armed rebellion and civil war. Nonetheless, the Gospel eventually triumphed, much to the dismay of the modern anthropologists who view the conversion of Fiji as another horrible example of Christian cultural hegemony, destruction and European imperialism.


The massacre of missionary John Williams, one of many who gave his life to bring the light of the Gospel to dark Fiji


The tomb of John Hunt in Vewa (Viwa), Fiji

John Hunt died at the age of thirty-six of dysentery, a common and often fatal illness of the islands. Among his last words, he cried out “God save Fiji!” His story inspired others to join the efforts of Christians to evangelize the various island groups of the Pacific. Today, about 65% of the Fiji islanders are self-described Christians, 64% of them are Methodists, 14% Roman Catholic, and most of the rest Anglican, Assemblies of God, and Seventh Day Adventists. Twenty-seven percent of the population is Hindu and about 6% Muslim. The Fijian sports teams, especially their rugby players, have gained international standing and they always gather before and after a game to sing praises to Jesus Christ and hallelujahs to Jehovah, the God of their nation. Listen in on YouTube here and here.

Someday all sports teams will do this! “Every knee shall bow.”


A traditional Fijian temple


Fijian children playing rugby


Resources for Further Study

The story of John Hunt is best told in The Life of John Hunt: Missionary to the Cannibals of Fiji, by George Stringer Rowe, 1874


Roald Amundsen Arrives at the South Pole, 1911

2022-12-15T17:42:12-06:00December 15, 2022|HH 2022|

“Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.” —Job 38:29-30

Roald Amundsen Arrives at the South Pole,
December 14, 1911

Norwegian explorer Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen lived almost at the other end of the world. He defied the predictions that he would end up a failure or dead, as had all his predecessors in known history, by discovering the South Pole a week and a day before Christmas in 1911. It was a magnificent and almost fatal accomplishment; it made the unsmiling Amundsen the leader of the greatest Polar expedition in history. Cold but alive, Roald and his crew found the most inhospitable spot on planet earth.


Members of Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition 1910-12 at the pole itself, December 1911, (from left to right): Roald Amundsen, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting

Although his mother did not want Roald, her fourth son, to enter the maritime world of his ancestors, and set him on a medical career, at the age of fifteen he read Sir John Franklin’s accounts of his overland Arctic expeditions, which subsequently, “shaped the whole course of my life.” Books sometimes have a way of defining the rest of a person’s life, especially in their teens. At the age of 25 in 1897 Amundsen joined a Belgian expedition to Antarctica as first mate on the Belgica.


The Belgica during the Antarctic Expedition of 1897-1899


Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen (1872-1928) in 1906

He learned a great deal from this expedition that would come in handy in future endeavors, especially as they relate to diet and disease. In his first independent exploration command in 1903, Amundsen led the first successful expedition through Canada’s “Northwest Passage,” from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. From local Inuit tribes he learned Arctic survival skills including wearing animal skins instead of wool in wet weather, and to use sled dogs to transport goods across snow-bound landscapes. Amundsen was one of a number of hard-core explorers determined to get their names in the history books for being the first to accomplish spectacular feats of discovery. Roald secretly planned to lead the way to the discovery of the South Pole. He left Oslo, Norway on June 3, 1910. On the Island of Medeira, he informed his discovery team of their destination—Antarctica—and sent a telegram to his chief competitor, Robert F. Scott, a British naval officer and fellow explorer, also heading for Antarctica in an attempt to get to the South Pole first.


Amundsen in a fur suit and snowshoes


Captain Robert F. Scott journaling in his cabin on October 7, 1911, shortly before setting out on the race to the South Pole

The geographic South Pole is at the southern end of the Earth’s axis, in the Continent of Antarctica, which has no full-time inhabitants or “owners.” The South Pole is approximately 300 miles South of the Ross Ice Shelf at about 9,300 feet above sea level, though it is constantly changing in the 8,850 foot thick ice sheet. Like its opposite pole, the South Pole is in darkness six months of the year and bright sunlight six months. The continent of Antarctica is 5.275 million square miles.


The respective routes of the Scott and Amundsen expeditions

Amundsen had twenty men, all good skiers, and fifty-two sled dogs aboard the Fram. Scott took about sixty men, along with ponies, dogs, and sleds in his ship the Terra Nova. They began the hunt for the South Pole from the Bay of Whales and Camp Evens respectively. Amundsen prepared very carefully for the trek—mistakes in Antarctica could prove fatal very quickly. He positioned food caches along his route ahead of time to be sure he had supplies coming and going. On October 19, 1911, Roald Amundsen set out across the ice sheets and mountains of Antarctica with four of his men and the dogs; Scott and his men left on November 1 with the ponies, on a longer but safer route than that taken by Amundsen.


Amundsen’s South Pole party, en route to the pole, November, 1911

Braving the bottomless crevasses, mountains of ice, and temperatures that are much lower than the North Pole’s, the many pieces of knowledge Amundsen had acquired in previous expeditions came together to enable him to survive the trek to the Pole, arriving there on December 14. He planted the Norwegian flag and left a note for Captain Scott. The English Captain reached the South Pole on January 17, with four of his men. They had been forced to eat the ponies, and travelled many miles further than his Norwegian rival. The extreme cold killed two of his four companions on the return trip, and Scott himself with his fourth man got caught in a blizzard with high winds, and they both also perished.


Cairn over the tent containing the bodies of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers


The crew of Scott’s ill-fated South Pole expedition at the Pole, from left to right: Oates (standing), Bowers (sitting), Scott (standing in front of Union Jack flag on pole), Wilson (sitting), Evans (standing), photo by Bowers who took this photograph using a piece of string to operate the camera shutter.

Roald Amundsen became the toast of the world of explorers and the subject of front page news around the world. With the fame and popularity came enough money to start his own shipping business. His book entitled The South Pole proved a commercial success. In 1928 Amundsen died at the age of fifty-six, when his plane went down over the ocean on the way to rescue a friend whose derigible had crashed, but his reputation was secure as the man who first found the South Pole. The United States built a station on the South Pole, with an airstrip known internationally as Amundsen-Scott. The quest for adventure and discovery has moved from earth to space. Who will be the first man to land on Mars?


Amundsen and Hanssen at the South Pole, marked by their Norwegian Flag

Anselm Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, 1093

2022-12-05T11:08:22-06:00December 5, 2022|HH 2022|

“Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” —Acts 17:11

Anselm Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,
December 4, 1093

Scholasticism is the term given to the theology of the Middle Ages (c.500-1500 AD). The Schoolmen “collected, analyzed and systematized” the doctrines of the Church worked out by the post-Apostolic Fathers, and argued their “reasonableness against all conceivable objections.” (Schaff, Vol. V, p. 587) They accepted the authority of the Scriptures but never attempted to discover the best ways to interpret them; they set out to confirm the traditions they had been handed by the Church Fathers and the papacy. The Scholastics made no contributions to exegesis and biblical theology but did pass on the dogmas developed by their predecessors. Most of them were monks, living in cloisters, devoted to God and scholarship. Their ultimate goal was to reconcile dogma and reason and to arrange the doctrines of the Church in an orderly system called summa theologiae. Anselm of Canterbury was the first of the great Scholastics. He was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury on December 4, 1093.


An ailing King William II of England (c. 1056-1100) forces the unwilling Anselm to take the crozier (shepherd’s crook) as a sign of his appointment to the position of
Archbishop of Canterbury

Anselm (1033-1109) began life in Aosta in the region that divides Italy from western Switzerland. He claimed that as a child he conceived that God sat on a throne at the top of the Alps, and in a dream, Anselm climbed up the mountain to meet Him. He was served white bread and treated kindly and, in the morning believed he had actually been to Heaven and back. His father opposed his taking the cowl and leaving for a monastery, but Anselm did so anyway, settling in and taking orders at La Bec in Normandy, France. Anselm wrote most of his works at La Bec and became prior, and in 1078, abbot. He succeeded his friend and mentor Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury in England, where he served until his peaceful death in 1109 at the age of seventy-one. He is venerated by Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans and respected by other Protestants as well.


The averred birthplace of Anselm in Aosta in what was formerly Upper Burgundy, now part of the Republic of Italy


Bec Abbey, western face—on the left, the old gatehouse and, on the right, the abbey dwelling

His writings were theological, pastoral, and personal, with several major treatises, homilies, meditations, and 412 letters to friends and colleagues. As was evident, “love to God was the soul of his daily life and love to God is the burning center of his theology.” One of his most famous theological aphorisms has been quoted a million times: fides praecedit intellectum—faith precedes knowledge, which churchmen have seen as a harmonization of supernaturalism and rationalism. He was so close in theology to St. Augustine that he has often been called “the second Augustine” and the “tongue of Augustine.” For Anselm, the two sources of knowledge were the Scriptures and the teachings of the Church, which were in perfect agreement, according to Anselm. That belief set the tone for all the other scholastics that followed him.


The west front of Canterbury Cathedral in 1821 showing the Norman north west tower prior to rebuilding


Canterbury Cathedral today

On November 29, 1943, the crew of Riki Tiki Tavi flew their fifth bombing mission—target: Bremen, Germany. After dropping their payload, the plane headed for home in England. For some reason, the plane fell behind the fleet—perhaps the engines had been struck by flak or machine gun fire. As the Riki Tiki Tavi fell behind, the German fighter planes pounced, machine guns and cannons firing. In the chaos of the fight, eight of the crew were killed, the navigator successfully bailed out, and Gene was severely wounded in both arms and his parachute shredded. The battle had been fought four miles above the earth so Gene’s arms bled little in the fifty-degrees-below-zero temperature. As he reached for his backup chute, the tail section broke off from the plane and began spinning toward the ground, four miles below, with nineteen-year-old Eugene Moran clinging to the seat. The speed and air pressure popped the gold teeth out of his head and blood pooled in his eyes, obscuring his vision.


Anselm dons the pallium, a symbol of his position as Archbishop of Canterbury


The meeting of Countess Matilda and Anselm of Canterbury in the presence of Pope Urban II
—Matilda was a staunch and abiding supporter of Anselm

Anselm also set out to prove that Christ’s atonement was necessary using the processes of pure reason. Again, logical argument was the monk’s vehicle to prove that Christ’s satisfaction of justice for sin required the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. All sin must either receive punishment or be covered by satisfaction. Can man make this satisfaction? No. Only the God-man could provide atonement. Anselm’s desire was to provide the pagan with no logical way out but through Christ.

The Church historian Phillip Schaff summed up Anselm’s character and contribution to the Church:

“He was the first of the Great schoolmen, was one of the ablest and purist men of the medieval Church. He touched the history of his age at many points. He was an enthusiastic advocate of monasticism. He was archbishop of Canterbury, and fought the battle of the [papal] hierarchy against the State in England. His Christian meditations give him a high rank in the annals of piety. His profound speculations marks one of the leading epochs in the history of theology and won for him a place among the doctors of the Church. . . . He was the most original thinker the Church had seen since the days of Augustine [4th Century].”


Anselm washes the feet of the poor


The Life of Anselm as told via a stained glass window in his honor, St. Corentin Cathedral in Quimper, Finistère, Brittany, France

Anselm laid the intellectual groundwork for those brilliant Scholastic churchmen who came after, as they systematized dogma and doctrine; the clergy were trained in logic and scholastic argument right up through the Protestant Reformers, who turned to the Scriptures themselves rather than just the early Fathers of the Church and their medieval exponents. After Anselm came Roscellinus, Abelard, Bernard, Hugo de St. Victor, and Gilbert of Poietiers. The second period provided Peter Lombard, Alexander Hales, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Ockam, and the greatest of them all, Thomas Aquinas. In the fullness of time, by the marvelous Providence of God, they were all superseded by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox who loved Augustine and Anselm and appreciated some of those who presented the Scholastic way, but returned to Sola Scriptura to reform the Church.


Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4–1109)


Resources for Further Study

For a good introduction and succinct narrative of the Medieval Church Scholastics, we recommend Volume 5 of Phillip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church.

Gene Moran Falls from the Sky, 1943

2022-11-30T15:26:02-06:00November 30, 2022|HH 2022|

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” —Jeremiah 29:11

Gene Moran Falls from the Sky,
November 29, 1943

In war there are a million ways to die. Occasionally someone, by the providence of God, survives what killed almost 100% of men caught in the same situation. A Wisconsin farm boy, eager to enlist in the Army Air Corps the second he turned 18, finally got his chance to fly against the Axis enemies of his country. Gene Moran would spend his combat time in Europe as a tail gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress and experience one of the million ways to die. Only he didn’t.


Gene Moran posing in uniform in 1943, the same year his plane was shot down (photo courtesy of John Armbruster)


A farm in the Kickapoo River Valley of Wisconsin

Raised in the Kickapoo Valley on a dairy farm, 17-year-old Gene Moran saw the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor as his ticket out of shoveling cow manure and farm chores. His mother did everything in her power to keep the boy out of the war, arguing that serving his country as a farmer was a perfectly acceptable alternative to getting killed on a battlefield. And since he wanted to join the Army Air Corps, a parental signature was needed after he turned 18, for without it, the enlistment age was 21. After trying three times to lie his way in with fake signatures, he lied to his parents about already enlisting, and they signed to keep him from getting picked up for being AWOL.


A B-17 Flying Fortress in flight, 1942

After completing gunnery school, Gene was promoted to Sergeant and ordered to join a B-17 Squadron as a tail gunner. The Boeing bomber carried a crew of ten. It was constructed as an offensive platform sporting a load of bombs and 13 .50 Cal. machine guns in nine positions (the Germans called the B-17 “the porcupine”), with a pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, radio man, ball turret, and top turret gunner, two waist gunners, and a tail gunner. Their “job” was to drop up to 8,000 pounds of bombs on enemy factories, railroad yards, and war installations. The B-17 provided the backbone of the Eighth Air Force bombing fleet in the European Theatre of the Second World War.


The tail gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress


Part of the crew Gene Moran flew with during World War II. Kneeling from left to right: Donald Curtis and Jesse Orrison. Standing from left to right: Walter Reed, Edmund Swedo, Gene Moran and Wilbert Provost (photo courtesy of John Armbruster)

The rear gunner sat on a bicycle seat and leaned into a steel chest plate to fire his twin machine guns, protecting the rear of the plane from enemy fighters. Gene Moran held that position on the plane named Riki Tiki Tavi, one of the ten-man crew. They were assigned as one of the forty planes of the 96th Bomb Group, one of forty Groups of the 8th Air Force, stationed at Stetterton Heath in East Anglia, England.


An RAF airfield in Ayshire, Scotland during WWII, typical of the makeshift airfields that served as home base for Allied air power

On November 29, 1943, the crew of Riki Tiki Tavi flew their fifth bombing mission—target: Bremen, Germany. After dropping their payload, the plane headed for home in England. For some reason, the plane fell behind the fleet—perhaps the engines had been struck by flak or machine gun fire. As the Riki Tiki Tavi fell behind, the German fighter planes pounced, machine guns and cannons firing. In the chaos of the fight, eight of the crew were killed, the navigator successfully bailed out, and Gene was severely wounded in both arms and his parachute shredded. The battle had been fought four miles above the earth so Gene’s arms bled little in the fifty-degrees-below-zero temperature. As he reached for his backup chute, the tail section broke off from the plane and began spinning toward the ground, four miles below, with nineteen-year-old Eugene Moran clinging to the seat. The speed and air pressure popped the gold teeth out of his head and blood pooled in his eyes, obscuring his vision.


A local newspaper recounting Gene’s remarkable survival story (photo courtesy of John Armbruster)


The crew of Gene Moran’s plane that was shot down on Nov. 29, 1943 during a bombing mission in Germany (photo courtesy of John Armbruster)

“The severed tail blasted into a forest, snapping limbs from trees. The crash spun Gene around in a half loop. His head slammed into the steel cables housed in the tail above him. The open end of the tail swung toward the ground and came to a screeching halt.” He crawled toward the dim light and out on to the forest floor. He was alive but with all his ribs broken, compound fractures in both arms, and a piece of his skull missing, exposing his brain! Gene was rescued by German soldiers and put back together by Serbian doctors in a German POW hospital. He spent the next two years in four different POW camps, survived a death ship and a six-hundred-mile death march, and was rescued by American forces at the end of the war. He lived until March of 2014, having fathered nine children with his beloved wife Peg, and died at the age of 92. They sang his favorite hymn at his funeral—“The Old Rugged Cross”.


Gene Moran in 2011 (photo courtesy of John Armbruster)

Of the approximately 120,000 American airmen who died in the war, historians believe only three men who fell without parachutes from such a height survived, and the only full-length detailed story that has been recorded is that of Eugene Moran, the farm boy from Wisconsin who couldn’t wait to get off the farm and into the fray.


Resources for Further Study

  • For the whole story, read Tailspin by John Armbruster (2022).

Death of Leo Tolstoy, 1910

2022-11-22T11:01:38-06:00November 22, 2022|HH 2022|

“And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.” —Ecclesiastes 1:17

Death of Leo Tolstoy, November 20, 1910

Several Russian novelists produced works that appear on almost every list of “the greatest novels ever written;” Count Lev Nickolayevich Tolstoy usually sits atop that list. On November 20, 1910, he died of pneumonia after collapsing in a train station at age 83, while apparently trying to escape his wife’s tirades. He spent his last hours preaching love, non-violence, and the value of a single tax system to anyone on the train who would listen.


Count Lev “Leo” Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Tsar Peter I, “The Great,” granted the title of Count to Pyotr Tolstoy in the early 18th Century, a grandee of an ancient noble family of Russia. Lev, usually known as Leo, was born in 1828 at the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, 130 miles south of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children born to Count Nickolai Ilyich Tolstoy—a hero of the war against Napoleon—and Princess Mariya Volkonskaya, who died when Leo was two years old. Upon the death of his father seven years later, Tolstoy’s very loving relatives, grandmother and aunts, took him and his siblings and raised them as their own. He was schooled by tutors until he entered The University of Kazan in 1844.


The Yasnaya Polyana estate, birthplace and childhood home of Tolstoy

Leo was not a great student, trying out several majors and transferring to another school. He pursued literature and ethics academically, attracted to the writing of Charles Dickens and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Tolstoy tried to conform to the social conventions of his day by gambling, drinking, and debauchery, finally just abandoning the University and returning to the estate, where he hoped to learn management of the property and the serfs, and live the life of an autodidact (self-taught learner).


Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870)


Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

The leopard could not change his spots, however, and he fell back into his previous addictions, finally leaving home again, to serve in the army with his brother. Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War in an artillery unit, serving heroically, but leaving the service after it, shocked by the senseless slaughter. After that experience, and witnessing a public execution in France, Tolstoy left his former life and became a “a non-violent spiritual anarchist” writing that “the truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all, to corrupt its citizens . . .I shall never serve any government anywhere.”


Tolstoy in uniform, 1854


Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-1885)


Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865

During a two year sojourn through Europe (1860-61), Tolstoy met Victor Hugo and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, both of whose impact on his thinking and writing can be seen in his novels, especially in his greatest work, War and Peace, published in full in 1869. As a novel, some consider it the greatest ever written; he mixes in powerful narrative history and profound philosophical tropes. Fictional narratives express a worldview that the author desires to communicate, and Tolstoy’s work best expresses the ideas that motivated him the rest of his life, and effect many people since his times. Mahatma Gandhi in India was so moved that he corresponded with Tolstoy and adopted his non-violence ideas, which in turn, transformed the history of India and the British Empire. In the middle to late 20th Century, Martin Luther King cited Tolstoy as a great influence on his thinking and actions.


Mohandas “Mahatma” Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)


Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; 1929-1968)

Russia emancipated its serfs in 1861 and Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded thirteen schools for the newly liberated peasants. Tsarist secret police shut them down. Tolstoy married the following year, Sophia Andreyevna Behrs (known as Sonya), who bore him thirteen children, all of them Counts and Countesses, the last one dying in 1979. His last grandchild died in 2007. During the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20th century, many Tolstoys left Russia, and his descendants are found today in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, the U.K. and the United States. In Russia, some of them are internationally known persons and one is a cultural advisor to President Putin.


Countess Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya née Behrs (1844-1919)


The Tolstoy family at the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in 1887

Leo Tolstoy drew on his life experiences in writing his novels and short stories, some of his earliest works concerned the war and his life growing up at the Tolstoy estate. War and Peace and Anna Karenina remain his most popular and greatest books. The former tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, fictional biographies of the main characters of the story, and essays on his philosophy of history. He rejects Carlyle’s idea that great men make history and teaches that it is actually made by an infinite number of decisions by ordinary people. History is therefore, virtually unknowable regarding causality and appears as a result of randomness, in Tolstoy’s vision.

Tolstoy fell into a deep depression, afraid of death. He turned to the Russian Orthodox Church for answers, but decided that all Christian churches had failed to discover the true faith. He rejected the Trinity, deity of Christ, immortality, existence of the soul and other salient doctrines. He ignored his excommunication and preached a religion based on five tenets which included love your enemies and do not resist evil, principles that attracted the Pacifists of the world, especially the aforementioned Gandhi. Tolstoy told his followers to avoid military service, voting, government work, or using the courts. His increasing irascible negativism caused a rift with his wife and their relationship became stormy and irredeemable although loving one another was at the core of his teaching.


Tolstoy in 1905


Leo and Sophia in 1910 on their 48th wedding anniversary, 6 weeks before his death

He continued writing popular novels, novellas, plays, and short stories until his death in 1910. His family remained essentially hostile to his beliefs. Both he and his wife kept intimate diaries for about 60 years, which have become grist for the literary mills themselves, regarding marriage, hypocrisy, and satire. His fiction remained realistic and often expressed moral lessons, and his international reputation exceeded all other Russian writers although, as he developed his cranky and unorthodox ideas, he criticized his own greatest works. He died at 82, an inspiration to some of the greatest writers of history and of socialists as well as anarchists. His life was so full of contradictions that he could be admired or vilified from every point of the political and literary compass.


Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, 1908, the first color photo portrait in Russia

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