Leo Tolstoy's Ego Death: The Curse Of Ambition

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]On September 9th, 1878, Russian author Leo Tolstoy, having just turned 50 years old, celebrated his birthday by falling into a deep depression. Luckily, Tolstoy eventually recovered, although that wasn't without effort, nor was it without mistakes along the way.

[00:00:18]Up until this moment, Tolstoy's life had been simple in a way only the most ambitious people's lives tend to be. He had a goal that he worked towards obsessively, and in his obsession, he neglected all external concerns or happenings unless either of the two intruded upon his end goal. Thus, life for Tolstoy had so far been anchored by an ambition and vanity, a way of living that only end in crisis once concluded.

[00:00:43]For Tolstoy, 50 years down the line, that's exactly what happened.

[00:00:48]For as long as he could remember, Tolstoy had committed himself to a desired goal, a desired way of life, a desired mode of being, and set about making all of these desires translate from [music] want to reality. He worked on himself, the internal and external, oscillating between moments of extreme vice and discipline until he mastered himself mentally [music] and physically.

[00:01:11]In this time, he wrote and found it a love of doing so, both for writing's therapeutic outlet and its vehicle towards transcendence, immortality by creation, great creation.

[00:01:22]Tolstoy had resolved to stamp his being on the flow [music] of history via literature, but all great things take time. By the age of 24, Tolstoy published his first novel, Childhood, in 1852 to moderate applause, and more followed. Boyhood in 1854, Youth in 1857, and then The Cossacks in 1863.

[00:01:45]Each release garnering more praise than the last. Tolstoy's first 11 years of publishing proved him to be a force in the Russian literary world. His literary success opened doors to bourgeois circles and spoils of fame.

[00:02:00]A lesser ambition would have been comfortable to stop there. But Tolstoy's personal ambition exceeded that of one of many big fish in a literary pond. He wanted his name spread across the globe.

[00:02:11]And so, he continued in pursuit of his lofty wants. The first of two Tolstoy epics was released serially between 1865 and 1867, published fully in 1868 when Tolstoy was 40.

[00:02:25]The book was named War and Peace. You may have heard of it. If you haven't, War and Peace is a 1,000-plus page sprawling, part novel, part historical chronicle, part essay set within the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s.

[00:02:40]To try and sum up the book in a paragraph feels near to impossible. In fact, even Tolstoy himself couldn't even give form to War and Peace. Following its serialization in 1867, critics unanimously praised the work, but couldn't define what it even was.

[00:02:56]Attempting to do so himself, Tolstoy wrote the essay "A Few Words on War and Peace" in 1868, wherein he finally answered the question, "What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, [music] even less it is a poem, and still less an historical chronicle.

[00:03:13]War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed."

[00:03:20]In other words, Tolstoy didn't just write a great novel, he reinvented it.

[00:03:25]With War and Peace's publication, Tolstoy's introduction to the world stage had been made, but even this wasn't enough. And so, he followed up with another epic in 1868 called Anna Karenina, and the success, the fame, and the money grew exponentially and parallel to one another. Everything was on the up, and Tolstoy, aged 50, had fulfilled his goal. He had quenched his ambition to be something or be a part of something greater than himself. A lifetime's experience and effort have been poured into the art of literature, and for his efforts, Tolstoy had two masterpieces on his hands. A heroic feat. Undoubtedly, Tolstoy knew War and Peace and Anna Karenina would outlive him, and that his genius would be known by numbers of people beyond his comprehension. [music] By age 50, he knew all of this. Yet, he wanted to die.

[00:04:17]What exactly Tolstoy wanted to die for is hard to pinpoint, but can be broadly explained as such: a loss of meaning.

[00:04:25]Everyone wants meaning, and everyone wants a purpose. The issue is nobody's idea of meaning relates to the next person's idea of meaning.

[00:04:33]Nor does meaning remain meaningful to one person throughout a lifetime. Life's goal posts shift with the accumulation of experience, and a failure to conform to that shift strips meaning away.

[00:04:46]Tolstoy encountered this roadblock of meaninglessness upon the publication of Anna Karenina, as he felt viscerally that no matter how high one's achievement or the rewards granted for that achievement, one is still left with one's own mortal self, which dies regardless of what or what not [music] has been achieved. The sudden drop of meaning led to Tolstoy's 1888 essay, A Confession, an essay wherein his spiritual crisis is confessed and analyzed. In this essay, Tolstoy admits to a scarily all-too-relatable source of meaning, which was the unconscious ambition to perfect himself in every way possible. Whether that perfection was found through physical exercise, mental discipline, or intellectual prowess, Tolstoy sought to challenge all of his deficiencies relying on willpower alone, with the aim of well, he didn't really know.

[00:05:37]Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith, my only real faith, that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life, was a belief in perfecting myself. But in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally. I studied everything I could, anything life threw in my way. I tried to perfect my will. I drew up rules I tried to follow. I perfected myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of exercises >> [music] >> and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be the pursuit of perfection.

[00:06:19]And he realized it was all vanity.

[00:06:22]Tolstoy's ambition had been less a want of the goal than a want of distraction from death and a way also to transcend that inevitable death. By perfecting oneself in every area, a person can transcend their mortal being to become something greater.

[00:06:38]So he had reason to himself. Yet Tolstoy soon realized whilst your name can live on past your death through achievement, the achievement itself doesn't solve the main issue.

[00:06:48]That you yourself will die.

[00:06:50]Which naturally breeds the follow-up question.

[00:06:53]Then what is the purpose of living?

[00:06:55]With certain death in mind, glorious thoughts of heroism seem vain and misdirected when facing the end that ends all.

[00:07:03]But whilst this general conclusion is what Tolstoy writes about in A Confession, he wasn't completely unaware of this truth before he turned 50.

[00:07:11]In his first epic, War and Peace, the character Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky represents this vain glorious attitude.

[00:07:20]In the first quarter of the book, Andrei is an ambitious man, eager to cement his name in the history books, to do something with his life, as they say.

[00:07:29]Fortunately for him, he was born at the right time to do so. Tension between France and Russia was increasing and war was imminent. And in war, Andrei saw potential. He sees his ambition as being realized on the battlefield and so goes off to fight Napoleon's army with hopes to distinguish himself amongst the mass of men following similar dreams. But when the time comes, his actions fall short.

[00:07:53]Whilst riding into battle without any heroic acts on his part, he is soon knocked off his horse finding himself staring up into the clouds. As he does so, he has a revelation.

[00:08:04]In that moment lying supine, the roar of grapeshot occurring around him, Andrei took solace in the sublime blue above and immediately, then and there, reconfigured his life's goals. He came to the same conclusion Tolstoy would later confess. The desire for glory or heroism for the sake of glory and heroism is nothing more than an attempt at placing a stake in the ground of life, at avoiding the flow of time and the washing away of all peoples of a generation as the next generation take their place, who themselves will all eventually wash away making way for the next to come through. But despite the most ambitious efforts, the act of glory or any degree of heroism will not push back against that tide. Even if your name remains on the lips of every man and woman in the future generations or if you are erected into marble and placed upon 100 plus feet columns in city centers or coated in portraits hung up in distinguished galleries or your name given to miles of land.

[00:09:07]No matter the achievement, the same end comes to everyone. And any attempt at thwarting that end via these glorious or heroic avenues is sheer vanity.

[00:09:18]After Andrei is captured by the French, he stares into the eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte, the embodiment of the wildest heights of glory, greatness, and ambition. But this encounter between the two only further strengthens Andrei's sobering mid-battle revelation.

[00:09:33]Indeed, everything seemed to him so futile and insignificant in comparison with that solemn and sublime train of thought which weakness, loss of blood, suffering, and the nearness of death had induced in him.

[00:09:47]Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei thought of the insignificance [music] of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and of the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no living person could understand and explain.

[00:10:02]Tolstoy uses Napoleon to reinforce Andrei's near-death outlook to the reader. Napoleon is arguably even now the ultimate self-made man, >> [music] >> a man who by sheer willpower, intellect, and luck, quite a lot of luck, took himself from relatively humble origins to the emperor of France. His story reads like a novel, and to this day his name still elicits reverence for his efforts.

[00:10:26]Whilst Tolstoy was writing War and Peace a few decades following the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon's impact on history was as undeniable as it is now. Therefore, when Andrei looks at Napoleon and further entrenches himself within this newfound viewpoint, it shows how insignificant a lofty ambition and desire for greatness, glory, [music] heroism, whatever, is when compared to the final act, death, of which Andrei came into close contact with on the battlefield. Yet, despite warnings in Tolstoy's literature, you can never stop human nature.

[00:11:00]And human nature, these desires, seem to be.

[00:11:04]In 1973, Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death, a study on heroism and how humans use heroism to rally against the fear of death. Becker believed humans live with a knowledge of death at all times, and it is this knowledge that spurs us to combat death by seeking varying avenues for [music] heroism, whether religious, cultural, or personal, to gain immortality or distract ourselves from the grim reality of someday shutting off. The immortality project is what Becker used to define this need for heroism.

[00:11:36]Heroism can be found in two ways, either individually or as a whole.

[00:11:41]In the case of the former, we see Andrei in War and Peace, who wants to rise above the thousands on the battlefield and present his own unique form of heroism. Consequently, if succeeded, raising him in the minds of all men and contributing to his rally against mortality. On the other hand, there is the immortality of being a part of something greater than yourself, as is expressed in the men who make up the whole of the Russian army in War and Peace. Every man contributing towards the army's means, as do every nut and bolt in the workings of a clock, subsequently encasing themselves in a moment in history whilst doing so.

[00:12:17]Just as in a clock, the result of the complex action of innumerable wheels and pulleys is only the slow, regular movement of the hands that indicate the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and Frenchmen, all the passions, hopes, regrets, humiliations, sufferings, the transports of pride, fear, and enthusiasm was only the loss of the Battle of Austerlitz, the so-called Battle of the Three Emperors, that is, the slow movement of the recording hand on the dial of human history.

[00:12:52]As previously mentioned, an immortality project can be found in many avenues of life. One of the most common in modern life and one in which Tolstoy himself pursued is in creativity. Becker saw creativity as another form of heroism, expressing itself in a tangible piece of art. The act of leaving behind a creation is, in essence, leaving behind a part of yourself, of giving yourself over to an object or body of work that will outlive your lifespan. This is also why we venerate great artists. We see their greatness as an act of heroism, an act we naturally see or want to see as capable within ourselves.

[00:13:30]It all boils down to this. The work of art is the artist's attempt to justify his heroism objectively in the concrete creation. It is the testimonial to his absolute uniqueness and heroic [music] transcendence. But the artist is still a creature and he can feel it more intensely than anyone else. In other words, he knows that the work is he, therefore bad, ephemeral, potentially meaningless, unless justified from outside himself and outside itself.

[00:13:59]Tolstoy had followed this particular form of heroism. His immortality project became his two greatest works, his two epics, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

[00:14:10]Even the titles of epics further supports the heroic-ism associated with these two colossal books as epic suggests that just by writing both books, he underwent a hero's journey to do so. These two epics were received and continue to be so by the world with open arms. Unfortunately, the world's embrace did not fill the spiritual hole inside its author.

[00:14:33]Tolstoy's crisis at the summit of his literary career led to the previously mentioned essay, A Confession, published in 1888. Whilst the essay doesn't solve his struggles with meaning, it does suggest some truths outside of the egotism, ambition, and heroic striving associated with his former life, whether through personalized or artistic perfection. Tolstoy searched through various fields of study, philosophy, science, history, theology, trying to find a meaning to life, but found nothing within those fields. Instead, he felt himself drawn toward the serfs on his land. He noticed that their seeming indifference to the meaning of life due to their acceptance of their lot was a wiser mode of being than the mode adopted by his most learned acquaintances. Once again, Tolstoy uses the metaphor of a clock. Instead of accepting the clock, life, for what it is, as the serfs supposedly do, the so-called wise men and women take apart the clock, piece by piece, only to later complain and ask why it doesn't work.

[00:15:34]The serfs, on the other hand, did not sit around contemplating the larger questions of life, simply because they hadn't the means or time to do so. They lived as they had to and accepted all that came their way. Tolstoy thus began, slowly but surely, to adopt this way of life. Over the coming years, he would relinquish more of his possessions, opting to help the serfs with physical labor up until old age. His final days on Earth consisted of a renouncement of all possessions as he, at the age of 82, left his property at Yasnaya Polyana and got as far as the nearby railroad station in Astapovo. Once there, he collapsed and was moved by bystanders to the stationmaster's house, [music] where he died.

[00:16:18]His final words were, "But the peasants, how do the peasants die?"

[00:16:24]It's evident we cannot help but rally against our oncoming deaths. We can only help how aware of this rally we are.

[00:16:32]That being said, I do not believe in preventing our innate desire for heroism, >> [music] >> but I do believe in accepting the truth of our ambitions and our desires.

[00:16:40]Accepting them more as phases than lifelong goals, the pursuits of which, if only briefly, bring a few days, hours, minutes of meaning, allowing us to escape death's looming with something at the end to show for it, a song, a book, a business, a family.

[00:16:57]>> [music] >> Later in War and Peace, the character Pierre speaks of soldiers under fire as acting like an everyday citizen does in daily life.

[00:17:07]Sometimes he remembered having heard that soldiers in a shelter under enemy fire, when they have nothing to do, make every effort to find some occupation the more easily to endure the danger.

[00:17:18]And it seemed to Pierre that all men were like these soldiers, seeking a refuge from life. Some in ambition, some in [music] cards, some in women, in wine, in playthings, horses, sport, and some in politics or government affairs.

[00:17:34]Nothing is trivial, nothing important.

[00:17:36]It's all the same. One should only try to escape from it as best one can, thought Pierre.

[00:17:43]If only one didn't see it, that terrible it.

[00:17:48]And it is this it which ambition guards us against.

[00:17:52]Particularly the type of ambition such as this channel was built on, that relies on an audience, on validation from an outside source.

[00:18:00]If possible, there would be a mode of heroism that is devoid of external applause. But even the humblest manner of living includes a self-satisfaction at not wanting applause. That in itself still considers the world's attention in my eyes, just from a different perspective. Status and want of it is innate in the human condition. And so I am not about to tell you how to live, only to say that instead of holding on to one heroic outcome, instead be prepared for your desires and ambitions to switch at any time for whatever reason, reaching a certain age and experience or simply a new like or dislike. And be willing to uproot yourself and start anew, just as Andre did and just as Tolstoy did, when they went in search of their next act of heroism or their next, as Becca put it, legitimate foolishness.

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