LEO TOLSTOY AND THE CANADIAN DOUKHOBORS

Following the completion of his major novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, in 1880, Russian writer Leo Tolstoy experienced a spiritual crisis that led him to denounce the privileges of his social class and its attendant material wealth, and to embrace the simple rural life of the peasantry. In the persecuted Doukhobor sect, who also rejected militarism and church ritual in favour of finding God, he saw a prime example of how it was possible to live his new-found pacifist ideals in everyday life. He was so taken with their lifestyle, calling Doukhobors "people of the 25th century," that in 1898, he decided to help finance their emigration en masse to Canada, away from the persecutions of the Russian church and state.