A Calendar of Wisdom
DAILY THOUGHTS TO NOURISH THE SOUL
WRITTEN AND SELECTED FROM THE
WORLD’S SACRED TEXTS BY
LEO TOLSTOY
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY
PETER SEKIRIN
SCRIBNER
This translation is dedicated to
MELISSA TEMERTY
SCRIBNER
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Introduction, translation, and compilation copyright © 1997 by Peter Sekirin
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SCRIBNER
and design are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING
Set in Stempel Garamond
Manufactured in the United States of America
9 10
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910.
[Krug chteniia. English, Selections]
A calendar of wisdom : daily thoughts to nourish the soul / written and selected from the world’s sacred texts by Leo Tolstoy; translated from the Russian by Peter Sekirin.
p. cm.
This translation, drawn from the enl. and completely rev. second ed., does not include the fifty-two stories called “The Sunday reading stories.”
Includes index.
(alk. paper)
1. Conduct of life—Quotations, maxims, etc. I. Sekirin, Peter. II. Title.
BJ1581.2.T626213 1997
087′.1—dc21 97-23501
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-6848-3793-2
eISBN-13: 978-1-439-13095-7
www.SimonandSchuster.com
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my deepest and most sincere acknowledgments to the following people:
professors who introduced me to Russian literature: K. Lantz, R. Bogert, Ch. Barnes, H. Marshall, R. Lindheim, O. Bakitsh, C. Bedford, M. Valdez, L. Hutcheon; and other professors and students of the Slavic Department and the Department of Comparitive Literature of the University of Toronto; my literary agent, Ivy Fischer Stone, of the Fifi Oscard Agency; my friend Kim Yates and Stella Cho, who read the manuscript; my parents, Vera and Vsevolod Sekirin; the staff at Scribner, especially my editor Scott Moyers and Susan Moldow; Their wisdom and tireless support have helped this project to become a reality.
—PETER SEKIRIN, Torbonto 1996
TOLSTOY AND THE CREATION OF A Calendar of Wisdom
PETER SEKIRIN
This was Leo Tolstoy’s last major work. With it, he fulfilled a dream he had nourished for almost fifteen years, that of “collecting the wisdom of the centuries in one book” meant for a general audience. Tolstoy put a huge amount of effort into its creation, preparing three revised editions between 1904 and 1910. It was his own favorite everyday reading, a book he would turn to regularly for the rest of his life.
The original idea for this work appeared to come to Tolstoy in the mid-1880s. His first recorded expression of the concept of
A Calendar of Wisdom
—“A wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people”—came in 1884. He wrote in his diary on March 15 of that year: “I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.” In 1885, he wrote in a letter to his assistant, Mr. Chertkov: “I know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkers as Socrates, Epictetus, Arnold, Parker…. They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue…. I would like to create a book … in which I could tell a person about his life, and about the Good Way of Life.”
The process of collecting these thoughts took over fifteen years. Tolstoy began writing between December 1902 and January 1903. Then in his late seventies, he had fallen seriously ill; while meditating about the meaning of life and death, he was inspired to begin compiling what he then called
A Wise Thought for Every Day
. When he finally sent the book to his publisher, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “I felt that I have been elevated to great spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people whose books I read and whose thoughts I selected for my
Circle of Reading
.” He would often return in his diary to meditate upon this book, repeating variants of “What can be more precious than to communicate every day with the wisest men of the world?” Tolstoy carefully selected the contributors to this volume, “among the very best writers,” as he repeated to his colleagues and friends. They represented a wide variety of philosophical views, cultural backgrounds, and historical periods: “It will be a big surprise to the readers,” Tolstoy wrote, “that together with Kant and other famous thinkers, they will find in my book thoughts by Lucy Malory, an unknown journalist from the United States, from Oregon.” The first edition appeared in 1904 under the title
Thoughts of Wise Men
. It saw three editions during Tolstoy’s lifetime, between 1904 and 1910, each published with a different subtitle:
The Way of Life, Circle of Reading,
and
A Wise Thought for Every Day
.
Between 1904 and 1907, Tolstoy worked on the enlarged and completely revised second edition, from which this, its first English translation, is drawn. In mid-August 1905 he wrote the introduction that follows and noted in his diary: “I have revised and enlarged my
Calendar,
now it is twice as big. For two months I did not read anything else, neither newspapers nor magazines, and I felt so good…. I became more and more astonished by the ignorance, and especially by the cultural, moral ignorance of our society…. All our education should be directed to the accumulation of the cultural heritage of our ancestors, the best thinkers of the world.”
The major difference between the first edition (
Thoughts of Wise Men
) and the second (
A Calendar of Wisdom
) was that Tolstoy now grouped the thoughts according to topics for a certain day, week, and month. He wrote on June 3, 1904, in his diary: “I am busy with the
Circle of Reading
…. I cannot do anything else…. I have selected thoughts and grouped them into the following major topics: God, Intellect, Law, Love, Divine Nature of Mankind, Faith, Temptations, Word, Self-Sacrifice, Eternity, Good, Kindness, Unification of People (with God), Prayer, Freedom, Perfection, Work, etc.” Tolstoy added about eight hundred of his own thoughts, written during his many years of meditation, or taken from previous diary entries. He generally started each day with an opening thought of his own, added quotes by other sources, and finished each day with a closing thought of his own.
Additionally, he wrote a short story, or vignette, three to ten pages in length for the end of every week. Each story corresponded to that week’s moral, philosophical, or religious topic; he prepared fifty-two stories in all and called them