Tolstoy’s Reading List: Essential Books for Each Stage of Life by Maria Popova Even if one could never “finish” great literature, one has to begin somewhere. Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Leo Tolstoy succumbed to a deep spiritual crisis and decided to pull himself out by finding the meaning of life. He did so largely by reading voraciously across the world’s major philosophical and religious traditions, discovering great similarities in how they dealt with the truth of the human spirit. He was also, as any great writer, an insatiable reader of literature, which he wove together into A Calendar of Wisdom — the proto-Tumblr he spent the final decades of his life assembling. But despite his wide and prolific reading, Tolstoy did consider specific books especially important and influential in his development. At the age of sixty-three, in a letter to a friend, he compiled such a list of the books that had most impressed him over the course of his life. Dated October 25, 1891, and found in Tolstoy’s Letters (public library), the missive is prefaced by the author’s disclaimer: “I am sending the list I began, but didn’t finish, for your consideration, but not for publication, since it is still far from complete.” (Reading, of course, is inherently incompletable — one can never hope to “finish” the body of literature, nor should one wish to.) Under the heading “WORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION,” Tolstoy divides his reading list into five distinct life-stages — beginning with childhood and ending with his age at the time — and ranks each title by excellence, from “great” to “v. great” to “enormous.” Curiously, Tolstoy seems to consider the teenage years one’s most formative, prescribing for them books greater in both quality and quantity, whereas the twenties and early thirties are most meager in both and mostly occupied by poetry — perhaps because few people at the time had the luxury of leisure for reading during their most vital wage-earning years, or maybe because Tolstoy simply believed that one should be busier living than reading during that life-stage. That only two known women figure in Tolstoy’s list is, one would imagine, less a function of his bias than of his era’s and his culture’s — though the latter certainly shape the former. CHILDHOOD TO AGE 14 OR SO “Great”: Tales from The Thousand and One Nights (public library): The 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman Pushkin’s Poems (public library): “Napoleon” “V. great”: The Little Black Hen (public library) by Pogorelsky “Enormous”: The story of Joseph from The Bible (public library) The Byliny (public library) folk tales: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich AGE 14 TO 20 “Great”: The Conquest of Mexico (public library) by William Prescott Tales of Good and Evil (public library) by Nikolai Gogol: “Overcoat,” “The Two Ivans,” “Nevsky Prospect” “V. great”: A Sentimental Journey (public library) by Laurence Sterne A Hero for Our Time (public library) by Mikhail Lermontov The Hapless Anton by Dmitry Grigorovich Polinka Saks (public library) by Aleksandr Druzhinin A Sportsman’s Notebook (public library) by Ivan Turgenev Dead Souls (public library) by Nikolai Gogol Die Räuber (public library) by Friedrich Schiller Yevgeny Onegin (public library) by Alexander Pushkin Julie, or the New Heloise (public library) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau “Enormous”: The Gospel of Matthew (public library): “Sermon on the Mount” The Confessions (public library) by Jean Jacques-Rousseau Emile: Or on Education (public library) by Jean Jacques-Rousseau “Viy” from The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (public library) David Copperfield (public library) by Charles Dickens AGE 20 TO 35 “Great”: Poems (public library) by F.T. Tyutchev Poems (public library) by Koltsov The Iliad / The Odyssey (public library) by Homer* Poems (public library) by Afanasy Fet The Symposium and The Phaedo (public library) by Plato “V. great”: Hermann and Dorothea (public library) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Notre-Dame de Paris (public library) by Victor Hugo AGE 35 TO 50 “Great”: The novels of Mrs. Henry Wood The novels of George Eliot The novels of Anthony Trollope “V. great”: The Iliad / The Odyssey (public library) by Homer* The Byliny (public library) Xenophon’s Anabasis (public library) “Enormous”: Les Misérables (public library) by Victor Hugo AGE 50 TO 63 “Great”: Discourse on Religious Subject (public library) by Theodore Parker Robertson’s Sermons (public library) “V. great”: The Book of Genesis (public library) Progress and Poverty (public library) by Henry George The Essence of Christianity (public library) by Ludwig Feuerbach “Enormous”: The Complete Gospels* (public library) Pensées (public library) by Blaise Pascal Epictetus Confucius and Mencius The Lalita-Vistara: Or Memoirs Of The Early Life Of Sakya Sinha (public library) by Rajendralala Mitra Lao-Tzu Complement with Tolstoy’s timeless meditation on art, his chronicle of spiritual awakening, and his compendium of humanity’s greatest wisdom. For more notable reading lists, see those of Carl Sagan, Alan Turing, Nick Cave, David Bowie, and Brian Eno. * Tolstoy’s original letter recommended reading Homer and the gospels in translation during one’s teens and in the Greek after age 35, reflecting a true classical education
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 22:27:45 +0000
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