Oaks for Peace
Green, Martin
Oaks for Peace TOLSTOY AND GANDHI, MEN OF PEACE by Martin Green Basic Books. 319 pp. $23.50. Tolstoy and Gandhi were inspiring oaks, each seasoned by nearly a century of struggle. Though both...
...Though Gandhi had apparently never read Tolstoy's great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he first read Tolstoy's Christian polemic, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, in 1894 and again in prison in 1906...
...Three quarters of a century ago, in 19091910, the great Russian writer (then over eighty) and the Indian political activist (then forty) exchanged letters...
...Perhaps their most basic commonality was that both men deplored the lives into which they were born...
...Both men were "religious radicals," he claims...
...What I mean by religious here is the opposite of empire...
...Tolstoy replied in less than a week with his permission...
...Both had large families...
...Green notes that "the plan of this book is to present the two lives side by side...
...Green's biography focuses more on their similarities...
...though they were only in their fifties...
...Gandhi published 20,000 copies...
...Shepherd Bliss (Shepherd Bliss is a lecturer in psychology at John F. Kennedy University in California...
...In middle age, both Tolstoy and Gandhi began "to call themselves old men...
...Both had troubled domestic lives...
...For those of us who have long admired either or both, or for those just discovering them, the book is inspiring to read...
...The substantial differences between Tolstoy and Gandhi are apparent, for the Russian writer was a child of the Nineteenth Century and Gandhi of the Twentieth...
...Both renounced sexual intimacy with their wives...
...Gandhi, moderately privileged by birth, raged against the lack of independence of his people and led them to political liberation...
...This biography, the third and final volume of the trilogy Green has labored over for years, is steeped in political science and psychology...
...According to Erikson's research, Gandhi was allegedly abusive to his wife and children...
...Though both became prominent as young adults and made their greatest achievements in their midlives, Martin Green's biography, Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace, focuses on his subjects in their later years...
...The crucial period of their lives, from this book's point of view, was their old age," Green writes...
...They were drawn together across cultural, linguistic, national, and racial barriers by common interests revealed in Gandhi's response to Tolstoy's writing...
...Gandhi wrote to Tolstoy asking permission to publish the letter and distribute it in India...
...The aristocratic Count Tolstoy cried out against the aristocracy and for the peasantry...
...Both were internationally famous at an early age and lived quite public lives...
...He does so from each subject's beginning, boyhood, adolescence, youth, and manhood to old age and death...
...Tolstoy died the following year, and in his obituary Gandhi noted that "we have endeavored to follow his teaching...
...Tolstoy and Gandhi are the greatest of anti-imperialists precisely because they attacked the sources and roots of empire outside the realm of politics—attacked the very logic of power," he says...
...They became old men because theirs was an old man's philosophy: a counsel of renunciation, a warning against appetite and enthusiasm, a serious call to a devout and earnest life, a bitter and detoxifying draught...
...Tolstoy died in flight from his wife...
...The idea of humanity, the fate of being human, is summed up in the image of the old man speaking with authority...
...Green shows the influence of the life cycle approach to psychohistory pioneered by Erik Erikson in Gandhi's Truth...
...Because of its emphasis on the role of aging in both men's lives and its substantial chapter "The Two Deaths," the book could easily be used in the growing number of courses in gerontology...
...In 1909 Gandhi read an unofficial version of Tolstoy's long Letter to a Hindu, in which the Russian calls Hindus to nonviolent resistance against England...
...that which binds people together and motivates the group not at or from the peak of its pyramid but from its base, not for conquest but for resistance, not in pride of greatness, but in solidarity of faith...
Vol. 48 • April 1984 • No. 4
