The article is based on the analysis of the correspondence between Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi which consists of six letters written in 1909-1910. It examines their shared outlook on the role of violence and nonviolence in the life of both a person and a society. It is shown that, despite the difference in religious, cultural and national traditions forming the backgrounds of the thinkers and the unlikeness of their personal lives, they were very close in their world outlook and morality. They are united by the inner and consistent dedication to the idea of nonviolence. Nonresistance to evil by force, which is an adequate presentation of love according to Tolstoy, and the concept of Satyagraha, which is a positive formula of the passive resistance, according to Gandhi, are identical concepts. Both thinkers considered the specific conditions of the struggle for the national liberation against the British rule not to be an argument permitting a derogation from the principle of nonviolence. “A Letter to a Hindu”, in which Tolstoy develops the ideas of his treatise “The Law of Love and The Law of Violence”, assumed a character of a program document for the nonviolent struggle of the Hindus against the colonialists in the South Africa. Tolstoy and Gandhi are at one in thinking that nonviolence as a social position is a consequence, expression and development of an individually responsible religious and moral personal life-choice. They elaborated a number of basic virtues of the individual nonviolent life philosophy: its first step is a chaste repression of the bodily needs starting with vegetarianism. It also includes manual labour, fearlessness and unconditional abandonment of lying. A radical critique of the material civilization is one more point making their views closer. Generally, the article characterizes Gandhi’s teaching as the development and a new stage of the Tolstoy’s teaching: it extends the idea of nonviolence to the sphere of the political and social activity of people.