Key Ideas
The questions — what will come of my life? Why should I live?
The Eastern fable of the traveller in the well, licking honey while two mice gnaw the branch.
Four ways out — ignorance, epicureanism, suicide, weakness.
Reason gives no meaning; faith is “the force of life”.
Tolstoy hid a rope so he would not hang himself from the beam between the wardrobes, and stopped carrying his gun hunting. He quotes Ecclesiastes, Solomon, the Buddha and Arthur Schopenhauer on the vanity of life.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalVanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas
Origin. The Vulgate’s rendering of Ecclesiastes 1:2. The Hebrew “hevel” means vapour, breath — what vanishes.
For the futility of ambition; the oldest nihilist sentence in Scripture. Tolstoy quotes it in A Confession.
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Anton Chekhov
Russian doctor, short-story writer and playwright who revolutionised both forms — stories without neat plots or morals, plays where the drama happens beneath ordinary talk — and became the great artist of wasted lives, quiet longing and compassion.
Mirza Ghalib
The greatest poet of Urdu (1797–1869) — master of the ghazal, of wit, paradox, grief and doubt — who lived through the fall of the Mughal world in 1857 and wrote its elegy in letters and verse.
Premchand
The greatest writer of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction — novelist of the Indian village, of peasants crushed by debt, caste and colonial rule — whose Godān and stories like “The Shroud” founded social realism in Indian literature.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Tolstoy’s novella of a respectable judge who, dying of a trivial injury, realizes that his correct, comfortable life was a lie — and finds, at the last moment, the light.
The Death of Cordelia
Lear enters carrying his hanged daughter, howling, searching for her breath with a mirror and a feather — “Never, never, never, never, never.”
Ivan Karamazov
The rational, tormented middle brother who “returns his ticket” to God’s world and authors the Grand Inquisitor — and whose idea that “everything is permitted” kills his father.