Leo Tolstoy, "The Three Hermits" (trans. Leo Wiener) (Russia)

It’s December 21. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Leo Tolstoy’s story, “The Three Hermits”:

According to the ancient wisdom of the Kabbalah, the world is not destroyed because of the presence of thirty-six hidden righteous ones called the Lamed Vavniks who ignore the existence of each other, and don’t know that they themselves are one of the righteous ones. In the Christian imagination of Tolstoy, this same notion is set out differently: the truly good are rarely recognized. “If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads,” Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” In this story, Tolstoy illustrates this idea by showing how the best of intentions can fail, if one does not consider that one’s way may not be the best. Similar to Ray Bradbury’s “The Fire Balloons” the story questions the single path to illumination and salvation.

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