A friend sent me the following from a Wikipedia page on Ludwig Wittgenstein...
He discovered Leo Tolstoy's 1896 The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Tarnów, and carried it everywhere, recommending it to anyone in distress, to the point where he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels".[166][167]
The extent to which The Gospel in Brief influenced Wittgenstein can be seen in the Tractatus, in the unique way both books number their sentences.[168]1916 Wittgenstein read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov so often that he knew whole passages of it by heart, particularly the speeches of the elder Zosima, who represented for him a powerful Christian ideal, a holy man "who could see directly into the souls of other people".[78][169]
Iain King has suggested that Wittgenstein's writing changed substantially in 1916, when he started confronting much greater dangers during frontline fighting.[170] Russell said he returned from the war a changed man, one with a deeply mystical and ascetic attitude.[171
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