The Murmur of the Thinking Reed: Blaise Pascal and Leo Tolstoy. Parallels (To the 400th anniversary of the birth of Blaise Pascal)

Abstract

Although the article was written for the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Blaise Pascal, it also tells about the Russian genius Leo Tolstoy. In his old age, Tolstoy promoted Pascal. The author, imitating Plutarch, offers a parallel biography. He recalls that the era of France, when Pascal lived, was an era of incredible mental stress, the era of Descartes, Gassendi, Racine, Corneille, Moliere, Fermat, La Rochefoucauld, the religious disputes of the Jansenists with the Jesuits. Pascal, very sick and very religious, participated in this dispute on the side of the Jansenists, communicated with Descartes, corresponded with the great mathematician Fermat and was himself an outstanding mathematician. After his death (at the age of 39), notes from his unfinished manuscript entitled “Thoughts” were published in one book, which immediately became an event of European philosophy. There he gave the image of a spiritual person as a thinking reed. In Russia, Pascal was recognized only in the 19^th century. One of the first to respond to his work was the great poet Tyutchev, who wrote that the “thinking reed” grumbles. However, it was Tolstoy who grumbled in life. He did not want to die, and was horrified at the thought that he was doomed, too. He did not accept the state, the church, world art (Raphael's Madonna and Shakespeare's tragedies), denied the need for an army. And it turned out to please the Bolsheviks. And Pascal was left alone, outside the parties, a thinking reed.