The teaching principle in the works of Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy is unanimously recognized as one of the pillars of “free pedagogy”, aimed at revealing the inner spiritual essence of man. This is associated with the writer’s desire for the development of the human personality, but they do not pay attention to the pantheistic basis of such aspiration, which is essentially hostile to the idea of personal self-development. Tolstoy preached the liberation of the faceless divine principle in man from the shackles of the body and personality through the power of divine love, erasing all differences and barriers between people. God, in Tolstoy’s teachings, reveals himself to the world as infinite love, striving for everything private (including human personalities) to merge in the unifying ecstasy of returning to the native divine universality. This is where the educational orientation towards extreme simplification, the emptying of personality as a way of its abolition for the sake of endless expansion when merging with a faceless deity comes from. Preaching his teachings, Tolstoy was forced to fight against Orthodoxy, which proclaimed the highest value of every unique human personality (soul), created by God for eternal life. He reinterpreted Christianity in his own way - in the spirit of pantheism and believed in himself as a real Teacher of Life along with Buddha, Lao Tzu, Moses, Christ, Mohammed.Having not received a proper Orthodox upbringing in childhood, Tolstoy, like many of his contemporaries, began to doubt the teachings of the Orthodox Church in his early youth. Over the years, criticism of Orthodoxy in his philosophical, journalistic, and artistic works grew and reached such a degree that it brought down an ecclesiastical anathema on his head in 1901. Researchers and followers of Tolstoy's pedagogy must remember that it is built on oppo-sition to Orthodoxy – the faith that is the foundation of Russia's people.