Leo Tolstoy and Platonic Inspiration

Leo Tolstoy had a deep and long-lasting interest in Plato. This Element looks at the way some particularly well-known Platonic themes can be found in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The themes in question include the journey between the mundane and the eternal, the theory of recollection, and the need to purify the soul of bodily passions.

Leo Tolstoy had a deep and long-lasting interest in Plato. This study looks at the way some particularly well-known Platonic themes can be found in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The themes in question include the journey between the mundane and the eternal (most famously represented in the allegory of the cave), the theory of recollection, and the need to purify the soul of bodily passions. The study begins with an account of Tolstoy's interest in Plato and an overview of the three central themes as they appear in the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium and Phaedrus. It then turns to specific episodes in War and Peace and Anna Karenina where a central character experiences an epiphany or a similar process of inspiration. Cathartic in nature, these episodes show the character rising from a mundane level of experience towards an entirely new level, variously described as infinite, eternal or divine.