What Is to Be Done? and Life

by Leo Tolstoy

As a fiction writer, Leo Tolstoy (2838-2920) is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of 19th-century Russian life, these two book stand at the peak of realistic fiction.

Genres: Russia, Russian Literature, Fiction, Classics

455 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 2007

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[Hadi Nezami · Rating 2 out of 5]

جالب بود یک روزه تموم شد
خاطراتش از یک روز گشت زدن میان فقرا و تاثیری که گذاشته و تاسیس خیریه و... کتاب خوبی بود ولی جالب نه دو ستاره خوبه

[Jerry van Veldhoven · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "What is to be done?" Lenin's pragmatism is coupled with sheer naivity. He writes that the projected "vanguard" will not "do the thinking for all," but its ranks and membership will increase with the time. He believes that the unchecked power of the social-democratic (later Bolshevik or communist) elite will rest on "comradeship" and "mutual confidence." This is an irony, because the suspicion and the killings of Party members were the most visible features of the future communist regime. How perverse Lenin's thinking was, how blind he was for the organization he was creating, is seen in the words: "They [the revolutionaries] have a lively sense of their responsibility, knowing as they do from experience that an organization of real revolutionaries will stop at nothing to rid itself of an unworthy member..."

[Ismail Rahimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tolstoy has discussed how poverty is created in a society, how we’re ignorant about it and rich people in charge of it. I thought the writer will have a solution to this obstacle by the end of the book but not really. It’s answering the question with a very simple answer: if you have two breads, give one to somebody who doesn’t.

[Leila Helmi Arjmand · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the last part of the book the writer become a spokesman of fanatical communist. He totally ignores succeed people higher education & years of hard work.
The age old saying "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

[Meysam · Rating 5 out of 5]

when all of us are like a spectator so poverty growing up every day.

[Vania]

His book showed why we decide to ignore helping poor people most of the time...

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have asked myself what is to be done for decades. :o)

[Atefe Mns · Rating 4 out of 5]

تا وقتی دیگران از گرسنگی بحال نزاع اند و من بیش از میزان احتیاجم غذا دارم و تا هنگامی که در مقابل دو دست لباس من گروه کثیری از کمترین پوشاک محرومند خود را سهیم درین مذلت و بیچارگی میدان.