ABSTRACT
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy learns more about Laozi, Confucius, Mo Di, Buddha, Vivekananda and other proponents of "Brahmanism," the Stoics, and a variety of other non-Christian religious figures. Tolstoy himself, in an early letter to Vladimir Chertkov, had suspected how unacceptably grandiose were the possibilities of a belief in a pantheistic God. The grandiosity of Tolstoy's pantheism is ever being mitigated by the fact that God is–or is in–other people besides Tolstoy himself. The religious grandiosity of the aging Tolstoy is not new. It may be detected already in the young man, although in a somewhat different form. For Tolstoy, the first and most important step in the direction of pantheism is erasure of the boundaries separating people from one another. If Tolstoy's vehement rejection of the Russian Orthodox "Mother Church" of his ancestors and of his childhood was a repudiation of his mother, then the grandiose pantheism of his later years aims at a reconciliation with his mother.
