1. From Ant Brothers to loving all as brothers and sisters

Abstract

At his death in 1910, Tolstoy was known as a great writer and as a voice of protest. He was a merciless critic of institutions that perpetrated, bred, or tolerated injustice, hatred, and violence in any form. Among literary critics and rival writers, it has been a commonplace to disparage Tolstoy’s ‘thought’ while praising his ‘art’. ‘From Ant Brothers to loving all as brothers and sisters’ describes the childhood game that Tolstoy played with his siblings, which contains many hallmarks of Tolstoy’s thought and art: the yearning for universal love, the aversion to violence and war, the transformation of the everyday world through imagination, and the search for human comfort in the shadow of death.