A Study Of Leo Tolstoy’s Philosophy Of Death

Death was the lingering subject of Leo Tolstoy’s literarycreations.The death complex was as deeply impressed in his thoughts and works as birthmarks followed the human body.Leo Tolstoy tirelessly made assumptions about death and took death as a part of life.With his sensitive sense of literature,he took the issue of personal death as the key to make analyses,constantly pursued the ideological evolution of the times,emphasized the importance of the Russian religious spirit,and payed attention to the moral and value significance of life.When Leo Tolstoy matured in later years,The Death of Ivan Erich,his only novel directly named after the death of a character,correctly conveyed his philosophy of death in the integration of social responsibility and religious belief.However,in previous studies,most of researchers understoodThe Death of Ivan Irich from the perspective of Heidegger’s philosophy of existentialism,and paid little attention to the phenomenon that both 19^thcentury Russian social thoughts and religious philosophy were incorporate-d into Leo Tolstoy’s death philosophy.Based on text analyses of The Death of Ivan Irich,this paper discussed how Leo Tolstoy integrate 19^thcentury Russian social thoughts into his philosophy of death from outwards to inner thoughts.Then on this basis,this paper also explained Leo Tolstoy’s attempt to address the crisis of times“nihil,hopelessness and freedom”in 19th century Russia with Christian“faith,hope,love”.It was made up of six chapters as following.The first part,“Introduction”,mainly expounded the origin of the paper’s topic,and according to Literature Review,pointed out the innovation and significance of this paper.The second part,analyzed Leo Tolstoy who described Ivan Irich’s awakening sense of death in details,was intended to echo the question of“the crisis of enlightenment and modernity in 19th century Russia”.The third and fourth parts revealed,Leo Tolstoy depicted Ivan Irich’s different life experiences where showed his specific understanding of the crisis of times in 19^th century Russia——In Leo Tolstoy’s view,the problem of“freedom and nihil”in western enlightenment and modernity context,which followed the process of Russian Europeanization,entered Russian ideological circle,and became the spiritual temperament and ideal goal that the intellectuals pursued endlessly at that time.What’s more,with the strong religious consciousness of Russian spirit itself,it caused the crisis of faith in essence.The crisis of faith was the essence of crisis of times in 19th century Russia.The fifth part explained the way to save 19th Russian era crisis that Leo Tolstoy put forward by means of transcending death.That was,to get rid of the crisis of faith of times——“nihil,hopelessness and freedom”with“belief,hope and love”.The sixth part,“Concluding”,was a further summary of the whole paper,which reflected on the positive significance of Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of death and found the paradox,contradiction of Leo Tolstoy’s struggles to expand the experience of individual death redemption to a social level.