New Year's Resolution: Be The Change

What do British imperialism and Leo Tolstoy have in common? Two things actually--Gandhi and armies in Asia. Intrigued? You should be.... 'Cause it's a little known fact that Tolstoy was Gandhi's major early influence, as detailed in my story below...

Sixty years ago this month, history's most famous pacifist was felled by an act of senseless violence. Just after 5 p.m. on January 30, a Hindu nationalist named Nathuram Godse shot Mahatma Gandhi three times in the chest. He died the following day.

Yet while Gandhi's life and message of non-violence are well known, a crucial chapter in his philosophy's genesis is largely forgotten. The story features the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, includes a bridge from Russia to Canada, and begins nearly 20 years before Gandhi's birth with the Crimean War (1853-56).

In his early 20s, growing tired of his (apparently) dull life of gambling and whoring, Tolstoy went to visit his brother, an army officer stationed in Central Asia. Tolstoy signed up and joined in imperial forays against the local Muslim population of the Caucasus mountains. He then moved on to the Crimean War, where he fought with an artillery unit during the Siege of Sevastopol.

Already a budding writer, he penned thinly fictionalized dispatches called the "Sevastopol Sketches" for a monthly literary journal back in St. Petersburg. "They were a sensation," says Professor Donna Orwin, a Tolstoy specialist at the University of Toronto. "Everyone was desperate for news from the front and here comes this great writer out of the blue."

As the world's first embedded journalist, he could accurately describe an officer's simultaneous vanity and dread of death: "At the instant the shell or mortar reaches you, you invariably think it will kill you," he wrote. "But pride keeps you up, and no one notices the dagger that is digging into your heart."

Read on...