LeO tOLsToi ...

I 'm reading this book which I'm finding amazing...for a few different reasons...
first it was from my grandma, as you see in the picture, it has her signature and a date, 1949...wow, that's amazing in itself....to read something my grandma read so long ago, and now she´s on the other realm...

another amazing thing is that it is a romance, which is not at all my kind of reading...but because it is Tolstoi I thought it must have something better than simply romance...and it's true...he has an amazing way to describe people in a social kind of view that i like... I'm still in the beginning though and it's captivating...

and last, what amazed me was his own introduction, more than 100 years ago, with this quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
" He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity and end in loving himself better than all"
wow... provoking isn't it! There´s some food for thought there...

Maybe some who will read this will call him heretic like the religious people of his time did...
actually his introduction is mainly a defence from many letters he received by the same religious who accused him of many things such as "old devil" ..." you will end up like a dog in eternal torment" (well, I wonder where this person got this about dogs).

I'll just leave you a few more things Tolstoi wrote afterwards defending some of the accusations...
" I renounced the Church that calls itself Orthodox. That's absolutely right.
But I didn't renounce the church because I rebelled against The Lord. I renounced it, on the other hand, because I wanted with all the strength of my soul, to serve God."

Interesting isn't it !!! This guy was far ahead of his time... even for today´s people...
I don't agree with everything he said either, but a lot of things I really resonated...

This is the end of his introduction (it´s a rough translation...sorry ) :
"I started by loving the Orthodox church more than myself: then I loved Christianity more than the Orthodox church; today I love the Truth more than anything else in the world. Truth and Christianity meet sometimes. I declare myself as a christian; and it's through the efforts I make to conciliate my actions with my beliefs , that I live in peace and joy, and it is in peace and joy that I walk towards death" (1901)

Tolstoi has some things to say... even today...