God Sees the Truth, but Waits

Tolstoy’s biography informs his literary work in many important ways. Born in 1828 to an old aristocratic family, Leo Tolstoy became one of the most famous and influential authors who has ever lived. He lost both of his parents at an early age and, together with his other siblings, grew up with relatives. In 1844, he went to Kazan University to study law and oriental languages, but he was more interested in pursuing the reckless and hedonistic life of the Russian aristocracy than in distinguishing himself academically. He soon abandoned his studies and returned to his family estate in Yasnaya Polyana near Tula, some 200 kilometers from Moscow.

In 1851, Tolstoy’s heavy gambling debts drove him to join the army. Tolstoy became an artillery officer and later a lieutenant in the Crimean War. This experience proved formative, giving Tolstoy the opportunity to observe and reflect on human nature in its many manifestations. At the end of the war, horrified by the number of deaths he had witnessed, Tolstoy left the army and turned seriously to writing. Between 1852 and 1856, he published his first major literary work, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. This semiautobiographical bildungsroman illustrates Tolstoy’s interest in simplicity and straightforward realism—interests that the author continued to nurture when, in 1855, he published his Sevastopol Sketches based on his experiences in the Crimean War.

The 1860s saw a few important developments in Tolstoy’s life. Tolstoy lost his brother Nikolai, an event that had a significant impact on him. In 1862, he married Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, with whom he had 13 children (eight of whom survived to adulthood). During this period, Tolstoy worked on his masterpiece War and Peace, which he published in 1867.

Over the course of the 1860s and 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a spiritual crisis and awakening, which he would later describe in detail in his nonfiction work A Confession (1882). Tolstoy adopted a literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ, coupled with an anarchist and pacifist ideology that would go on to influence Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. (among others). Tolstoy also devoted much time and resources to helping the Russian peasantry, who in the 19th century constituted the vast majority of Russia’s population. He started 13 schools for peasants and began writing primers for these schools; “God Sees the Truth, but Waits,” first published in 1872, was included in one of these primers. The story is a good example of the religious and spiritual themes that increasingly preoccupied Tolstoy at the time of his spiritual crisis.

As Tolstoy’s religious and ideological views became more and more radical, his personal relationships suffered. His marriage, once happy, grew strained. He established a small Christian anarchist group, the Tolstoyans, with whom he spent much of his time. Still, Tolstoy continued to devote attention to his successful literary career, and during the 1870s and 1880s he punished some of his most important works, including Anna Karenina (1878) and the novellas The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1889); in the 1890s, he began working on the novel Hadji Murad, which was published posthumously in 1912.

One winter night in 1910, at age 82, Tolstoy—his beliefs as radical as ever—made a show of renouncing his aristocratic life for good. He left his home and walked off into the cold night. A few days later, he died of pneumonia at the Astapovo Train Station.

The short story “God Sees the Truth, but Waits” concisely illustrates many of the ideas and themes that drove Tolstoy throughout his life. Like many of Tolstoy’s literary works, the story is a meditation on religion, justice, and the difficulties of pursuing a moral life. The story’s inclusion in a primer for peasant students also demonstrates Tolstoy’s lifelong concern for the Russian peasantry. Finally, the story represents Tolstoy’s own wrestling with complex religious and theological issues as it recounts the spiritual transformation of a fictional character at a critical point in Tolstoy’s own spiritual development.