The last paragraph in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace et al

"In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious."

So let us ease into our acquaintance with the great Russian master through his short story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” The story can be synopsized easily enough:

After slowly accumulating more and more property, a greedy Russian named Pahom hears that the Bashkirs, a minority race in Russia, are practically giving their land away. He decides to visit them and they offer him as much land as he wants, provided he can walk its perimeter in one day. Pahom agrees and goes out on his trek, but when the sun starts to set, he finds he has walked too far. Running back, Pahom collapses at the starting point just as the sun disappears behind the horizon. The Bashkirs try to congratulate him, only to find him dead. In answer to the question posed in the title, the Bashkirs bury him in a hole six feet long by two feet wide.

"Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of non resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self suffering. He admits of no exception to whittle down this great and divine law of love. He applies it to all the problems that trouble mankind."
-Mohandas Gandhi
(19 November 1909) Introduction to the publication of Tolstoy's A Letter to a Hindu (1909)

"The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power…There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man."

-Leo Tolstoy

Merian C Cooper - post WWI and Polish-Bolshevik War

Merian C. Cooper as returned to America - after four years of European/Russian residency. Fighting in both WWI and the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920, pronounced "dead" twice; and escaping a Bolshevik prison to trek 800 kilometers across the Eastern Russian outback to Riga, Latvia, Coooper wrote these thoughts upon his arrival to New York City in 1921.

"I must strike through unspeakable opposition, and fight battles every one of which costs me my heart's blood. Day and night I am in straits, for those enemies are so artulf that many I struck to death still give themselves the appearance of being alive, changing themselves into all forms, and spoiling day and night for me... Everywhere, and when I should least suspect it, I discovered on the ground traces of their silvery slime... they poured hell into my heart, so that I wept poison and sighed fire; they crouched near me even in my dreams; and I see horrible specters, noble lackey faces with gnashing faces and threatening noses, and deadly eyes glaring from cowls, and white ruffled hands with gleaming knives.

"And even the old woman who lives near me in the next room considers me to be mad, and says that I talk the maddest nonsense in my sleep; and the other night she plainly heard me calling out -- 'Dulcina [sic] is the fairest woman in the world, and I the happiest knight on earth; but it is not meet that my weakness should disown this truth. Strike with your own lance, Sir Knight!"

Pictured: Merian C. Cooper with Cedric Fauntleroy next to their Fokker D4 - during the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920.

Tolstoy The Kingdom of God is Within You

Your duties as a citizen must be subordinated to the superior obligations of the eternal life of God, and cannot be in opposition to them. As Christ’s disciples said eighteen centuries ago, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you yourselves judge,” (Acts 4:19) and, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5:29)