The story begins with the demanding youth of a nobleman, Prince Stepan Kasatsky. After losing his father at the age of twelve, Kasatsky is educated at a military school and gains widespread recognition due to his rapid ascent in society. Still, this success does not satisfy his hunger for perfection. Driven by ambition, Kasatsky becomes engaged to a beautiful and well-connected woman. However, shortly before their marriage, he discovers a shocking truth: his fiancée had previously been involved with Emperor Nicholas I. This revelation deeply humiliates him and shatters his pride. Unable to cope with this blow to his ego and sense of honor, Kasatsky abruptly breaks off the engagement and enters a monastery.

He becomes Father Sergius. After nine years in the monastery and thirteen years in a hermitage—where crowds eventually flock to be healed by his prayers—he spends a total of twenty-two years under strict rules to escape temptation and human praise. In pursuit of this ideal, Sergius even cuts off one of his own fingers, the incident that  the ones who have not read the book will find out the rationale behind after reading it.

But…at last, all these years of dedication creeps him out, seeing his infirmity on handling sins with memorised prayers. Father Sergius understands that he has only prayed by his memorise without any connection with God, which in turn leads him to abandon everything but seek for the truth for the last time by seeing one person who he could barely remember: Kasatsky’s pure cousin Pashenka… The girl that was on Kasatsky’s mind with her naive gesture while being tortured by boys 30 years ago.

Of course, I will not “reveal” the ending, as I have left out many of the story’s focal points. However, I would like to highlight one specific sentence:

“Pashenka is what I should have been, and was not. I lived for man, on the pretext of living for God; and she lives for God, imagining she lives for man.”

From my standpoint, this sentence is the most essential part of the book because it mirrors Tolstoy’s own radical shift in moral consciousness. Throughout his life, Tolstoy embodied nearly every human contradiction: he moved from atheism to a profound faith, and from the life of a hunter to that of a committed vegetarian. Yet, despite these paradoxes, many—myself included—believe he finally grasped an “undeniable truth” during his final moments of isolation in nature and while writing Father Sergius (which was published a year after his death). Perhaps a genuine humanism is the only true way to reach God. This idea is, in my view, Tolstoy’s greatest legacy to us.

Finally, I would like to point out a “cue” that I believe Tolstoy intended for us to notice. This “cue” appears the moment Kasatsky discovers his fiancée’s past with the Emperor. Tolstoy notes that Kasatsky “would have killed him, but it was his beloved Tsar.” This obedience to a “Leader” is strikingly similar to Kasatsky’s later, unconscious obedience to the ritual of reciting prayers. It suggests a flaw that we still insist on repeating today—one that Tolstoy tried to warn us against back then: Obeying authorities this much easily… To define this human disgrace, I turn to a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886):

“For every impulse is imperious, and as such, attempts to philosophize…”

Appeal to Leo Tolstoy, who managed to return to where he came from:

Nature.

— Furqan