Leo Tolstoy

The Russian novelist who recurs across Kyle’s reading less for his fiction than for two ideas that get cited as frameworks. The first is his theory of history: in Faith is Not Blind and on Kyle’s History page, Tolstoy holds that to understand events we “must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the… small elements by which the masses are moved.” How To Read a Book expands this — Tolstoy “was not a historian… he was a novelist,” but believed “the causes of every human action… were so manifold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened.” Mortimer Adler lists him among the exemplars of expository and imaginative style.

The second is the “Tolstoy Effect,” which Charlie Munger draws from a Tolstoy passage in Poor Charlie’s Almanack (and in Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment): the worst criminals don’t appraise themselves as bad — they either deny the crime or decide it was understandable and forgivable. Munger’s second half of the effect — making excuses for “fixable poor performance” instead of providing the fix — becomes, for Kyle, a note on humility and parenting (The Tolstoy Effect, Spirit of Humility). Tolstoy appears once more in Double Entry, where (through the character Levin) he voices literary unease at the “rationalisation” of life that double-entry bookkeeping embodied.

Context: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina; the history-theory Kyle cites runs through the second epilogue of War and Peace, and Levin is the autobiographical farmer-philosopher of Anna Karenina.

Where this appears

• Faith is Not Blind — Tolstoy’s theory of history: study “the small elements by which the masses are moved.”
• History — the same theory, used to frame how to read events (and Church history) honestly.
• How To Read a Book — Tolstoy the novelist-as-historian; causes of action too complex to fully know; an exemplar of style.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack — Munger’s “Tolstoy Effect” on self-regard and making excuses for fixable poor performance.
• Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment — the same Tolstoy-effect passage in Munger’s talk.
• Double Entry — Levin voices Tolstoy’s unease at the “rationalisation” of life that double entry embodied.
• Mortimer Adler — lists Tolstoy among his style/literature exemplars.