'I took it with me on holiday, and you know what? Once you get into it, it's a page-turner,' he matily confided.

He is a pure Tolstoyan.Īcting the mildly philistine everyman, Davies reported that he had axed the novel's boring essayistic bits but whetted appetites for the drama of boudoir and battlefield. Foes who castigate the allotment-tending, jam-making, nuke-scrapping Jeremy Corbyn as a ferocious Bolshevik have got the wrong end of the stout peasant-style stick. Gandhi passed the Count's baton to Martin Luther King, then to a host of good-life movements and peaceable resisters all around the world. Although snuffed out by Soviet brutality after 1917, his principles of non-violent, spiritually driven social revolution spread further and lasted longer than Lenin's doctrine of state terror. For Tolstoy, delighted to find not just another fan who shared his ideals but a dynamic organiser who might put them into practice, both men had chosen 'the same struggle of the tender against the harsh, of meekness and love against pride and violence'.įor decades, Leo Tolstoy was not just the best-known but the most influential author in the world. 'Your work in the Transvaal, which to us seems to be at the end of the Earth, is yet in the centre of our interest,' Count Leo Tolstoy told Mohandas K Gandhi from his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. The pair exchanged friendly, admiring letters. 'Very eager to engage your active interest and sympathy.' The disciple won his idol's support for a campaign of non-violent protest in South Africa. In autumn 1909, a young lawyer and activist wrote from London to one of his heroes, now a frail old man who would die within a year.

War and Peace instal the new