Tolstoy Ploughing (c.1889) by Ilya Repin
For an upper-class literary gent, Tolstoy made a notable effort to take
practical action to alleviate other people's suffering. His dedication
to the peasantry was nowhere more evident than in his famine relief
work. After the crop failure of 1873, Tolstoy decided to stop writing
Anna Karenina for
a year to organize aid for the starving, remarking to a relative, "I
cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary
ones." His friends and family thought it crazy that one of the finest
novelists in the world would put one of his works of genius on the
backburner. But Tolstoy was adamant. He did it again after the famine in
1891, and with other members of his family spent the next two years
raising money from around the world and working in soup kitchens. Can
you imagine a bestselling author today setting aside their latest
book to do humanitarian relief work for two years?
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