Reach Out and Touch Faith. Week 40: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Frederich Nietzsche

Week 40 of Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course brings together three demanding—and deeply philosophical—works: Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. But before we get started, I offer a short primer on reading Russian lit. The names can be a real challenge!

Tolstoy’s novella, written after his spiritual “conversion,” is a devastating meditation on death, meaning, and self-deception—circular in structure but spiraling ever deeper. It may be the finest short work I’ve read so far. 

Dostoyevsky’s famous parable interrupts the narrative of The Brothers Karamazov to pose unsettling questions about freedom, faith, and institutional power, turning conventional religious assumptions upside down. 

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil proved the most challenging: dense, contrary, and deliberately destabilizing, it rejects inherited moral frameworks in favor of examining desire, psychology, and power. Together, these works confront the shifting relationship between God, morality, and the modern self—making this one of the most intellectually intense weeks of the project.

We are back next week with French writers who offer a totally different tone. See you soon!

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