How did Gandhi and Tolstoy come to correspond?

Gandhi read Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) while in South Africa, and it transformed his thinking about nonviolent resistance. He wrote to Tolstoy in 1909, and Tolstoy — then 80 and near the end of his life — responded warmly. They exchanged letters until Tolstoy's death in 1910. Fourteen letters survive.

What did Tolstoy believe that influenced Gandhi?

Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist who believed that love — specifically the Sermon on the Mount — was incompatible with state violence, military service, and taxation systems that funded violence. He thought that if people simply refused to cooperate with violent state systems, those systems would collapse. Gandhi took this logic and built it into satyagraha.

What did they write to each other about?

Primarily: the moral necessity of nonresistance to evil, the impossibility of combining Christianity (or any genuine ethics) with state violence, and the practical application of these principles to colonial resistance. Tolstoy was delighted to find someone actually applying the philosophy he had theorized. Gandhi was delighted to have a moral and intellectual framework from the West to draw on.

What did Gandhi name after Tolstoy?

He established Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg in 1910 — a cooperative community in South Africa for his followers. It was a practical experiment in the simple living and communal discipline he was developing.

Why does this correspondence matter?

Because it shows Gandhi's thinking didn't emerge from a vacuum. It was shaped by cross-cultural intellectual dialogue — a Russian novelist's Christian anarchism meeting an Indian lawyer's political situation in South Africa. The most transformative political philosophy of the 20th century grew at this intersection.