Francis Pfost Jr.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy and Emile Zola on the Meaning of Life: Pessimism, Religion, and the Individual in History Francis Pfost Jr.

Two great contemporary writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) of Russia and Emile Zola (1840-1902) of France, were haunted by the same philosophical problem, the individual's relation to God and the universe and the purpose of his relatively short life in it. Although Tolstoy and Zola took different approaches to this problem in their literary work, both were profoundly affected by pessimism and lack of faith in institutional religion in their lifelong search for answers to humanity's greatest question and to the seeming hopelessness of the individual to affect history or even his own fate. How these two great writers and thinkers of yesteryear approached the fundamental question of the meaning of human life and what they discovered present an instructive guide for people of any age, of any epoch, of any era, of any time.