Two great contemporary writers of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lev
Tolstoy of Russia and Émile Zola of France, were haunted by the same problem, the individual’s
relation to God and the universe and the purpose of his relatively short life in it. Although Tolstoy
and Zola took different approaches to this problem in their literary work, both were profoundly
affected by pessimism and lack of faith in institutional religion in their life-long search for answers
to humanity’s greatest question and to the seeming hopelessness of the individual to affect history
or even his own fate. How these two great writers and thinkers of yesteryear approached the
fundamental question of the meaning of human life and what they discovered present an
instructive guide for people of any age, of any epoch, of any era, of any time.