Leo Tolstoy’s anti-war ideas in Russian literature of the WWI (1914—1918) period

The First World War became the time to check the vitability of L. Tolstoy’s anti-war ideas and it also became the catalist to the formation of anti-war morality, the new public understanding of the World without wars. On the other hand, the appeal to L. Tolstoy’s publicism of 1880—1910-ies gives us an opportunity to get a clearer idea of the complexity of the ethical problems of patriotism and opposition to the war for literature and the country-in-war itself. In our opinion the Russian literature of the 1914—1918-ies, though undeservedly forgotten, put these questions rather sharply and rightly and tried to shape up the public opinion.