Leo Tolstoy

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• Born: 9 September 1828
• Birthplace: Yasnaya Polyana, Tula Province, Russia
• Died: 20 November 1910
• Best Known As: Author of War and Peace

Considered one of the world's greatest novelists, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy is famous especially for the 19th century classics War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1877-78). Although he was born into nobility, Tolstoy spent much of his life as a champion of Russia's peasant class, notably in the field of education. He began his literary career in the 1850s, publishing a trilogy about his own life: Childhood (Detstvo, 1852), Boyhood ( Otrochestvo, 1854) and Youth (Yunost', 1857). Tolstoy served in the Russian army during the Crimean War, and his book Sevastopol Sketches (Sevastopol'skie Rasskazy, 1855-56) was well-received in literary circles and praised for its realistic depiction of war. After travelling throughout Europe, Tolstoy returned to the family estate and devoted himself to raising a family and writing his great psychological novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. From the 1880s until his death, he devoted himself to more spiritual and philosophical matters, writing several essays on ethics and morals and coming to terms with his own Christian conversion (described in 1879's Confessions). His other works include the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1884) and the novel Resurrection (1899-1900).

In 1910, at the age of 82, Tolstoy left his home with his youngest daughter, Alexandra, and hopped a train for an unspecified destination. He fell ill along the way and ended up dying a few days later at a railroad stationmaster's house in Astapovo.

Tolstoy, Count Leo (1828-1910), Russian soldier, later pacifist, environmentalist, writer, war correspondent, and author of War and Peace, regarded by some as the world's greatest novel and also a work of great historical, political, and military insight.

Born on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, 100 miles (161 km) south of Moscow, Tolstoy dropped out of Kazan University, aged 19. As a young man he possessed enormous physical strength and agility, with a limitless appetite for vodka and women, and he could not be bothered with studies. In 1851 he joined his soldier brother Nikolay in the Caucasus where the Russians were engaged in a protracted war with the great guerrilla commander Shamyl and his Chechen and Dagestan supporters. He enrolled as a volunteer in an artillery unit and, after taking part in a raid, later described in The Raid, was invited to join the regiment as a potential officer. The Cossacks was also a tale based on the Caucasus experience and in early 1852 he narrowly escaped being captured which laid the foundations for his story The Prisoner of the Caucasus. The Chechen guerrillas used to hide in the forests in the flat country round Grozny, so the imperial Russian army methodically cut it down, and his story The Wood Clearing describes such an expedition.

He was commissioned early in 1854 and in April 1855 was sent to Sevastopol during the Crimean war as an artillery officer—the élite of the Russian army. He had already decided a professional military career was not for him, but nevertheless resolved to see his service through. He was nominated for the Cross of St George twice, but on one occasion he was absent from the parade where the medals were presented, and on the other he gave it up in favour of an old soldier for whom the medal would mean a higher pension. Both events were fully in character.

At Sevastopol, the horror of war really hit him. While young Russian ladies still strolled in the besieged city, Tolstoy, on the ramparts above, trod on pale, rotting, liquefying bodies, which he described in his Sevastopol Stories 1855-1856. He also witnessed the French attack on the Malakoff redoubt. His experience at Sevastopol, and especially of fighting the French, in conditions not far different from Napoleonic warfare, gave him the insight to write War and Peace, published in six volumes in Moscow in 1868. The novel is an epic description of the campaign of 1812 with real characters such as Napoleon, Bagration, and Kutuzov as well as fictional ones. Most would argue that Anna Karenina, published in 1878, is a better novel, but for a military historian there is no contest.

After Anna Karenina he went through a period of despair and emerged from it a fundamentalist Christian who rejected all churches and all authority. Had he not been a national icon and a count, he would no doubt have been imprisoned as an anarchist. This was combined with a belief in the mystical bond between the Russian soil and people that was indistinguishable from the views of the narodniki who also populated the tsar's prisons. His extreme pacifism was to reach out to a most unlikely convert in Gandhi, who also shared his views on abstinence. Tolstoy spent his last years as a recluse, writing religious tracts and railing against the Russo-Japanese war.

Bibliography

• Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London, 1957).
• —— The Cossacks, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London, 1960).
• Doroshenko, S. S., Lev Tolstoy, voin i patriot (Leo Tolstoy, Soldier and Patriot) (Moscow, 1966)

— Christopher Bellamy

The Russian novelist and moral philosopher Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) ranks as one of the world's great writers, and his "War and Peace" has been called the greatest novel ever written.

Leo Tolstoy was one of the great rebels of all time, a man who during a long and stormy life was at odds with Church, government, literary tradition, and his own family. Yet he was a conservative, obsessed by the idea of God in an age of scientific positivism. He brought the art of the realistic novel to its highest development. Tolstoy's brooding concern for death made him one of the precursors of existentialism. Yet the bustling spirit that animates his novels conveys - perhaps - more of life than life itself.

Tolstoy's father, Count Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy, came of a noble family dating back to the 14th century and prominent from the time of Peter I. Both Tolstoy's father and grandfather had a passion for gambling and had exhausted the family wealth. Nikolay recouped his fortunes, however, by marrying Maria Volkonsky, bearer of a great name and heiress to a fortune that included 800 serfs and the estate of Yasnaya Polyana in Tula Province, where Leo (Lev Nikolayevich) was born on Aug. 28, 1828, the youngest of four sons. His mother died when he was 2 years old, whereupon his father's distant cousin Tatyana Ergolsky took charge of the children. In 1837 Tolstoy's father died, and an aunt, Alexandra Osten-Saken, became legal guardian of the children. Her religious fervor was an important early influence on Tolstoy. When she died in 1840, the children were sent to Kazan to another sister of their father, Pelageya Yushkov.

The Yushkovs were among the highest society in the town, Pelageya's father having been governor of the province before his death. Balls and receptions dominated the Yushkovs' social life, and there was much concern about what was comme il faut. Aunt Pelageya told Tolstoy that nothing was better for a young man's development than an affair with an older woman. He was no prude, but he was awkward and proud, being known to his friends as the "Bear."

Tolstoy was educated at home by German and French tutors. He was not a particularly apt pupil, but he was good at games. In 1843 he entered Kazan University; planning on a diplomatic career, he entered the faculty of Oriental languages. Finding these studies too demanding, he switched 2 years later to the notoriously easygoing law faculty. The university, however, had too many second-rate foreigners on its faculty, and Tolstoy left in 1847 without taking his degree.

Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana, determined to become a model farmer and a "father" to his serfs. His philanthropy failed because of his naiveté in dealing with the peasants and because he spent too much time carousing in Tula and Moscow. During this time he first began making those amazingly honest and self-lacerating diary entries, a practice he maintained until his death. These entries provided much material for his fiction, and in a very real sense his whole oeuvre is one long autobiography. In 1848 Tolstoy attempted to take the law examination, this time in St. Petersburg, but after passing the first two parts he again became disenchanted, returning to the concerts and gambling halls of Moscow when not hunting and drinking at Yasnaya Polyana.

Army Life and Early Literary Career

Nikolay, Tolstoy's eldest brother, visited him at this time in Yasnaya Polyana while on furlough from military service in the Caucasus. Leo greatly loved his brother, and when he asked him to join him in the south, Tolstoy agreed. After a meandering journey, he reached the mountains of the Caucasus, where he sought to join the army as a Junker, or gentleman-volunteer. In the autumn he passed the necessary exams and was assigned to the 4th Battery of the 20th Artillery Brigade, serving on the Terek River against the rebellious mountaineers, Moslem irregulars who had declared a holy war against the encroaching Russians.

Tolstoy's border duty on a lonely Cossack outpost became a kind of pagan idyll, hunting, drinking, sleeping, chasing the girls, and occasionally fighting. During the long lulls he first began to write. In 1852 he sent the autobiographical sketch Childhood to the leading journal of the day, the Contemporary. Nikolai Nekrasov, its editor, was ecstatic, and when it was published (under Tolstoy's initials), so was all of Russia. Tolstoy now began The Cossacks (finished in 1862), a thinly veiled account of his life in the outpost.

From November 1854 to August 1855 Tolstoy served in the battered fortress at Sevastopol. He had requested transfer to this area, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Crimean War was in process. As he directed fire from the 4th Bastion, the hottest area in the conflict for a long while, Tolstoy managed to write Youth, the second part of his autobiographical trilogy. He also wrote the three Sevastopol Tales at this time, revealing the distinctive Tolstoyan vision of war as a place of unparalleled confusion, banality, and heroism, a special space where men, viewed from the author's dispassionate, Godlike point of view, were at their best and worst. Some of these stories were published while the battle they described still raged. The first story was the talk of Russia, attracting (for almost the last time in Tolstoy's career) the favorable attention of the Czar.

When the city fell, Tolstoy was asked to make a study of the artillery action during the final assault and to report with it to the authorities in St. Petersburg. His reception in the capital was triumphal. Because of his name, he was welcomed into the most brilliant society. Because of his stories, he was lionized by the cream of literary society. Tolstoy's photographs at this time show a coarse-looking young man with piercing eyes, spatulate nose, and mustache. He was not tall but very strong.

During the same year Tolstoy visited Moscow, garnering there both success in society and esteem among authors. By the time he returned to St. Petersburg, he was beginning to tire of his new literary acquaintances. He felt that they were insincere talkers. He offended both camps of what soon became a war within the Contemporary group - with the opposing points of view represented by the aristocratic Ivan Turgenev and the radical Nikolai Chernyshevsky. His lifelong friendship with the conservative poet A. A. Fet dated from this time. Tolstoy was never a "professional author"; he avoided literary gossip, and his independent wealth permitted him to remain aloof from the scramble of making a living.

School for Peasant Children

In 1856 Tolstoy left the service (as a lieutenant) to look after his affairs in Yasnaya Polyana; he also worked on The Snowstorm and Two Hussars. In the following year he made his first trip abroad. He did not like Western Europe, as his stories of this period, Lucerne and Albert, show. He was becoming increasingly interested in education, however, and he talked with experts in this field wherever he went. In the summer he returned to Yasnaya Polyana and set up a school for peasant children, where he began his pedagogic experiments. In 1860-1861 Tolstoy went abroad again, seeking to learn more about education; he also gambled heavily. During this trip he witnessed the death of his brother Nikolay in the south of France. More than all the grisly scenes of battle he had witnessed, this event brought home to Tolstoy the fact of death, the specter of which fascinated and terrified him throughout his long career.

After the freeing of the serfs in 1861, Tolstoy became a mediator (posrednik), an official who arbitrated land disputes between serfs and their former masters. In April he had a petty quarrel with Turgenev, actually challenging him to a duel. Turgenev declined, but the two men were on bad terms for years.

Tolstoy's school at Yasnaya Polyana went forward, using pioneering techniques that were later adopted by progressive educationists. In 1862 Tolstoy started a journal to propagate his pedagogical ideas, Yasnaya Polyana. He also took the first of his koumiss cures, traveling to Samara, living in the open, and drinking fermented mare's milk. These cures eventually became an almost annual event.

Golden Years

In September 1862, Tolstoy wrote his aunt Alexandra, "I, aged, toothless fool that I am, have fallen in love." He was only 34, but he was 16 years older than Sofya Andreyevna Bers (or Behrs), whose mother had been one of Tolstoy's childhood friends. Daughter of a prominent Moscow doctor, Bers was handsome, intelligent, and, as the years would show, strong-willed. The first decade of their marriage brought Tolstoy the greatest happiness; never before or after was his creative life so rich or his personal life so full. In June 1863 his wife had the first of their 13 children.

His wife's diary entry for Oct. 28, 1863, reads: "Story about 1812; he is very involved with it." And indeed Tolstoy was. Since 1861 he had been trying to write a historical novel about the Decembrist uprising of 1825. But the more he worked, the farther back in time he went. The first portion of War and Peace was published in 1865 (in the Russian Messenger) as "The Year 1805." In 1868 three more chapters appeared; and in 1869 he completed the novel. Tolstoy had been somewhat neglected by critics in the preceding few years because he had not participated in the bitter literary politics of the time. But his new novel created a fantastic outpouring of popular and critical reaction.

War and Peace represents an apogee in the history of world literature, but it was also the high point of Tolstoy's personal life. He peopled his enormous canvas with almost everyone he had ever met, including all of his relations on both sides of his family. In so doing he celebrated a patriarchal way of life - rich in its country contentments and glittering in its city excitements. Balls and battles, birth and death, all were described in copious and minute detail. In this book the European realistic novel, with its attention to social matrix, exact description, and psychological rendering, found its most complete expression.

The genial scenes of feast and hunt were a reflection of Tolstoy's great personal happiness at this time. His estate prospered, and he was deeply in love with his wife. She worshiped her husband, doing everything in her power to free him from all but his writing. Their son Ilya reported that she copied out the complete text of War and Peace seven times.

But even in this year of Tolstoy's greatest success ominous signs of the future began to appear. The brilliant rhetoric of those passages in War and Peace in which Tolstoy argued for his own idiosyncratic theory of history foreshad-owed the often crotchety tone of the later intransigent moralist. In the midst of all his happiness, in 1869, Tolstoy experienced a deep and mysterious personal trauma. Traveling to buy an estate in Penza Province, he stopped overnight in Arzamas. Awakened by a nightmare, he felt that he was dying. Once again, as when Nikolay had died, he was reminded of his mortality, and his so-called conversion of 1880 may, in a sense, be traced back to this experience.

Tolstoy's next 10 years were equally crowded. He published the Primer and the first four Readers (1872-1875), his attempts to appeal to an audience that would include children and the newly literate peasantry. From 1873 to 1877 he worked on the second of his masterworks, Anna Karenina, which also created a sensation upon its publication. The concluding section of the novel was written during another of Russia's seemingly endless wars with Turkey. The country was in a patriotic ferment. M. N. Katkov, editor of the journal in which Anna Karenina had been appearing serially, was afraid to print the final chapters, which contained an attack on war hysteria. Tolstoy, in a fury, took the text away from Katkov, and with the aid of N. Strakhov he published a separate edition that enjoyed huge sales.

The novel was based partly on events that had occurred on a neighboring estate, where a nobleman's rejected mistress had thrown herself under a train. It again contained great chunks of disguised biography, especially in the scenes describing the courtship and marriage of Kitty and Levin. Tolstoy's family continued to grow, and his royalties were making him an extremely rich man.

Spiritual Crisis

The ethical quest that had begun when Tolstoy was a child and that had tormented him throughout his younger years now drove him to abandon all else in order to seek an ultimate meaning in life. At first he turned to the Russian Orthodox Church, visiting the Optina-Pustyn monastery in 1877. But he found no answer. He began reading the Gospels, and he found the key to his own moral system in Matthew: "Resist not evil." In 1879-1880 Tolstoy wrote his Confession (published 1884) and his Critique of Dogmatic Theology. From this point on his life was dominated by a burning desire to achieve social justice and a rationally acceptable ethic.

Tolstoy was a public figure now, and in 1881 he asked Alexander III, in vain, to spare the lives of those who had assassinated the Czar's father. He visited Optina again, this time disguised as a peasant, but his trip failed to bring him peace. In September the family moved to Moscow in order to further the education of the older sons. The following year Tolstoy participated in the census, visiting the worst slums of Moscow, where he was freshly appalled.

Tolstoy had not gone out of his way to propagate his new convictions, but in 1883 he met V. G. Chertkov, a wealthy guards officer who soon became the moving force behind an attempt to start a movement in Tolstoy's name. In the next few years a new publication was founded (the Mediator) in order to spread Tolstoy's word in tract and fiction, as well as to make good reading available to the poor. In 6 years almost 20 million copies were distributed. Tolstoy had long been under surveillance by the secret police, and in 1884 copies of What I Believe were seized from the printer. He now took up cobbling and read deeply in Chinese philosophy. He abstained from cigarettes, meat, white bread, and hunting. His image as a white-bearded patriarch in a peasant's blouse dates from this period.

Tolstoy's relations with his family were becoming increasingly strained. The more of a saint he became in the eyes of the world, the more of a devil he seemed to his wife. He wanted to give his wealth away, but she would not hear of it. An unhappy compromise was reached in 1884, when Tolstoy assigned to his wife the copyright to all his works before 1881.

In 1886 Tolstoy worked on what is possibly his most powerful story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and his drama of peasant life, The Power of Darkness (which could not be produced until 1895). In 1888, when he was 60 years old, his thirteenth child was born. In the same year he finished his sweeping indictment of carnal love, The Kreutzer Sonata.

Last Years and Death

In 1892 Tolstoy's estate, valued at the equivalent of $1.5 million, was divided among his wife and his nine living children. Tolstoy was now perhaps the most famous man in the world; people came from all over the globe to Yasnaya Polyana. His activity was unabated. In 1891 and in 1893 he organized famine relief in Ryazan Province. He also worked on some of his finest stories: The Devil (1890, published posthumously) and Father Sergius (1890). In order to raise money for transporting a dissenting religious sect (the Doukhobors) to Canada, Tolstoy published the third, and least successful, of his three long novels, Resurrection (1899). From 1896 to 1904 he worked on the story that was his personal favorite, Hadji Murad, the tale of a Caucasian mountaineer.

Tolstoy's final years were filled with worldwide acclaim and great unhappiness, as he was caught in the strife between his convictions, his followers, and his family. The Holy Synod excommunicated him in 1901. Unable to endure the quarrels at home he set out on his last pilgrimage in October 1910, accompanied by his youngest daughter, Alexandra, and his physician. The trip proved too much, and he died in the home of the stationmaster of the small depot at Astapovo on Nov. 9, 1910. He was buried at Yasnaya Polyana.

Further Reading

Tolstoy's own enormous output (his collected works run to 90 volumes) is exceeded only by the amount of material written about him. Among the memoirs about Tolstoy are A. B. Goldenweizer, Talks with Tolstoy (trans. 1923); Alexandra Tolstoy, Tolstoy: A Life of My Father. (1953); and V. Bulgakov, The Last Year of Leo Tolstoy (trans. 1971). There are two good biographies in English: Ernest J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (1946), and Henri Troyat, Tolstoy (1965; trans. 1967). Simmons is more complete and scholarly, but Troyat is more enjoyable to read.

Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (1953), is a brilliant short study. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (1959), when it is not being precious, contains many insights into Tolstoy both as artist and thinker. John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (1966), is a good study of Tolstoy's contribution to the genre. Ralph E. Matlaw, ed., Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967), offers stylistic criticism of Tolstoy's work. For background James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (1966), is excellent.

(1828-1910) Russian writer, ascetic, pacifist, and anarchist. Moral critic of tsarism. Advocated the abolition of the state and property—the sources of exploitation—and the creation of a communal society based upon Christian principles. He stressed personal redemption rather than political resistance, and was an important influence upon Gandhi.

— Geraldine Lievesley

(click to enlarge)
Leo Tolstoy. (credit: The Bettmann Archive)

(born Sept. 9, 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire — died Nov. 20, 1910, Astapovo, Ryazan province) Russian writer, one of the world's greatest novelists. The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy spent much of his life at his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. After a somewhat dissolute youth, he served in the army and traveled in Europe before returning home and starting a school for peasant children. He was already known as a brilliant writer for the short stories in Sevastopol Sketches (1855 – 56) and the novel The Cossacks (1863) when War and Peace (1865 – 69) established him as Russia's preeminent novelist. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the novel examines the lives of a large group of characters, centring on the partly autobiographical figure of the spiritually questing Pierre. Its structure, with its flawless placement of complex characters in a turbulent historical setting, is regarded as one of the great technical achievements in the history of the Western novel. His other great novel, Anna Karenina (1875 – 77), concerns an aristocratic woman who deserts her husband for a lover and the search for meaning by another autobiographical character, Levin. After its publication Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis and turned to a form of Christian anarchism. Advocating simplicity and nonviolence, he devoted himself to social reform. His later works include The Death of Ivan Ilich (1886), often considered the greatest novella in Russian literature, and What Is Art? (1898), which condemns fashionable aestheticism and celebrates art's moral and religious functions. He lived humbly on his great estate, practicing a radical asceticism and in constant conflict with his wife. In November 1910, unable to bear his situation any longer, he left his estate incognito. During his flight he contracted pneumonia, and he was dead within a few days.

For more information on Leo Tolstoy, visit Britannica.com.

Tolstoy, Count Leo (1828-1910) Tolstoy's early life was the unremarkable round of a landed Russian gentlemen, although during it he produced his masterpieces War and Peace (1862-9) and Anna Karenina (1873-6). Around 1876 he underwent a Christian conversion, and from then onwards proclaimed an ascetic, self-denying and largely anarchistic gospel of renunciation and love, which influenced subsequent thinkers such as Gandhi. Works expounding this theme include among them A Short Exposition of the Gospels (1881), What I Believe In (1882), What Then Must We Do? (1886), and The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908).

(1828 - 1910), Russian prose writer and, in his later years, dissident and religious leader, best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Childhood and Youth (1828 - 1852)

The fourth son of Count Nikolai Ilich Tolstoy and Princess Maria Nikolaevich Volkonskaya, Tolstoy was born into the highest echelon of Russian nobility. Despite the early deaths of his mother (1830) and father (1837), Tolstoy led the typically idyllic childhood of a nineteenth-century aristocrat. He spent virtually every summer of his life at his family's ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana, located about 130 miles (200 kilometers) south of Moscow.

Although he initially flunked entrance exams in history and geography, Tolstoy entered Kazan University in 1844. He was dismissed from the department of Oriental languages after failing his first semester's final examinations. He reentered the next year to pursue a law degree, and, two years later, knowing that he was about to be dismissed once again, he requested leave for reasons of spoiled health and domestic circumstances. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana with grandiose plans for self-improvement, experiments in estate management, and philanthropic projects. Over the next few years, he made little headway on these plans, but he did manage to acquire large gambling debts, a bad reputation, and several bouts of venereal disease. He also began keeping a detailed diary that, with some significant lapses, he kept for his entire life. These journal entries occupy twelve volumes, each several hundred pages long, of his Complete Collected Works.

Early Literary Works and Yasnaya Polyana School

Tolstoy's first published work, Childhood (1852), appeared in the influential journal The Contemporary, and was signed simply "L.N." The work was enthusiastically praised for the complex psychological analysis and description conveyed by the work's seemingly simple style and episodic, nearly plotless, structure. The five years after the publication of Childhood saw Tolstoy's literary star rise: he published sequels to Childhood (Boyhood [1852 - 1864] and Youth [1857]) and a handful of war stories. (Tolstoy had enlisted as an artillery cadet in 1852 and seen action in the Caucasus and later in the Russo-Turkish war). Almost without exception, the stories enjoyed success with both critics and readers.

In 1857 Tolstoy left the army as a decorated veteran and traveled Europe, where he wrote a run of poorly received stories and novellas that were praised for their artistry but sharply criticized for their plainspoken condemnation of civilization and apathy toward the burning questions of the day. In part because of this criticism Tolstoy announced in 1859 his renunciation of literary activity, declared himself forevermore dedicated to educating the masses of Russia, and founded a school for peasant boys at Yasnaya Polyana, which he directed until its closure in 1863. Tolstoy produced few literary works during this time, though he wrote several articles on pedagogy in the journal Yasnaya Polyana, which he published privately. This was not the last time Tolstoy was involved in education. A decade after closing the second Yasnaya Polyana school he began an educational series The New Russian Primer for Reading, and spent nearly two decades working on it. The primer sold more than a million copies, making it the most read and most profitable of Tolstoy's works during his lifetime.

Marriage and the Great Novels (1862 - 1877)

In the fall of 1862 Tolstoy married Sofya Andreevna Behrs, the daughter of a former playmate and a girl half his age. Their marriage of nearly fifty years produced ten offspring who survived childhood and several who did not. Though tumultuous, their early relationship was mostly happy. In 1863 Tolstoy closed his school and commenced work on his magnum opus, War and Peace (1863 - 1869). Partly a historical account of the period from 1805 to 1812, partly a novelistic description of quotidian life of fictional characters, and partly a historiographical animadversion on conventional historical accounts, War and Peace was initially perceived as defying generic convention, sharing characteristics with the didactic essay, history, epic, and novel. Perhaps reflecting its chaotic structure, War and Peace portrays war as intensely chaotic. It ridicules the tsar's and military strategists' self-aggrandizing claims that they were responsible for the Russians' victory over la Grande Armée. The sole effective commander was General Mikhail Kutuzov, who in previous historical accounts had been portrayed as an inept blunderer. In the novel he is depicted as the ideal commander inasmuch as his modus operandi derives from the maxim "patience and time" - that is, he relies little on plans and military science, and instead on a mix of instincts and resignation to fate. The true heroes of the war, the novel contends, were instead individual Russians - soldiers, peasants, nobles, townspeople - who reacted instinctively and unconsciously, yet successfully, to an invasion of their homeland.

In 1873 Tolstoy began his second great novel, Anna Karenina (1873 - 1878), which has one of the most famous first lines in world literature: "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The novel's unhappy families are the Karenins, Aleksey and Anna, and the Oblonskys, Stiva (Anna's brother) and Dolly. Anna feels herself trapped in marriage to her boring if devoted husband, and begins an affair with an attractive if dim officer named Vronsky. Aleksey denies Anna's request for a divorce, and she decides defiantly to live openly with Vronsky. Their illicit affair is simultaneously condemned and celebrated by society. Stiva is a charismatic sybarite who philanders through life taking advantage of Dolly's innocence and preoccupation looking after the household. The third, happy couple of the novel, Konstantin Levin and Kitty (Dolly's youngest sister), are unmarried at the beginning of the story. Their inconstant courtship and eventual marriage take place mostly as the background to the drama of the Oblonskys and Karenins. The novel ends with Anna, nearly insane from guilt and stress, throwing herself beneath a train. Levin, now a family man, undergoes a religious conversion when he realizes that his constant preoccupation with questions of life and death, combined with an innate inclination to philosophize, had prevented his seeing the miraculous simplicity of life itself.

Conversion and Late Works

Notwithstanding his sensual temperament, Tolstoy had always suffered from sporadic bouts of intense desire to adopt an ascetic's life. While still at work on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy began A Confession (1875 - 1884), the first-person narrative of a man - very similar to Levin at the end of Anna Karenina - who, despite his success and seeming happiness, finds himself in the throes of depression and suicidal thoughts from which he is rescued by religion. Although the rhetoric of the work suggests a radical conversion - Tolstoy later described the time as an "ardent inner perestroika of my whole outlook on life" - some critics have cast doubt on the fundamentality of the conversion. As early as 1855, for instance, Tolstoy wrote in his diary plans to create a new religion "cleansed of faith and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth."

Tolstoy spent the 1880s and 1890s developing his religious views in a series of works: A Critique of Dogmatic Theology (1880), A Translation and Unification of the Gospels (1881), What I Believe (1884), and The Kingdom of God Is within You (1893). Most of these works were banned by the religious or secular censor in Russia, but were either printed illegally in Russia or printed abroad and clandestinely smuggled in, thus adumbrating the fate of many Soviet works printed as samizat or tamizdat. The core of Tolstoy's belief is contained in God's commandments in the Sermon on the Mount: do not resist evil, swear no oaths, do not lust, bear no malice, love your enemy. Tolstoy is everywhere and at pains to point out that adherence to these injunctions, especially nonresistance to evil, inevitably leads to the abolition of all compulsory legislation, police, prisons, armies, and, ultimately, to the abolition of the state itself. He described his beliefs as Christian-anarchism. Vladimir Nabokov described them as a neutral blend between a kind of Hindu Nirvana and the New Testament, and indeed Tolstoy himself considered his beliefs as a syncretic reconciliation of Christianity with all the wisdom of the ages, especially Taoism and Stoicism. Following this creed, Tolstoy became a vegetarian; gave up smoking, drinking, and hunting; and partially renounced the privileges of his class - for instance, he often wore peasant garb, embraced physical labor as a necessary part of a moral life, and refused to take part in social functions that he deemed corrupt.

His new life led to increased strife with his wife and family, who did not share Tolstoy's convictions. It also attracted international attention. Beginning in the 1880s, hundreds of journalists, wisdom-seekers, and tourists trekked to Yasnaya Polyana to meet the now-famous Russian writerturned-prophet. Tolstoy, who had always kept up extensive correspondence with friends and family, was inundated with letters from the curious and questing. In his lifetime he wrote 10,000 letters and received 50,000. In 1891 he renounced copyright over many of his literary works. Free of copyright restriction and royalties, publishing houses around the world issued impressive runs of Tolstoy's works almost immediately upon their official publication in Russia. In 1901 his international fame was increased when Tolstoy was excommunicated for blasphemy from the Russian Orthodox Church.

In addition to works on philosophy, religion, and social criticism, Tolstoy penned during the last decades of his life a number of works of the highest literary merit, notably the novella The Death of Ivan Ilich (1882), the affecting story of a man forced to admit the meaninglessness of his own life in the face of impending death; and Hadji Murat (1896 - 1904, published posthumously), a beautifully wrought but uncompleted novel set during the Russian imperialistic expansion in the Caucasus. Tolstoy's third long novel, Resurrection (1889 - 1899), though inferior in artistic quality to his other novels, is a compelling casuistical account of a man's attempt to undo the wrongs he has committed. Tolstoy also wrote an influential and debated body of art criticism. What Is Art? (1896 - 1898) attacked art for not fulfilling its true mission, namely, the uniting of people into a universal collective. His On Shakespeare and Drama (1903 - 1904) dismissed Shakespeare as a charlatan.

Increasingly distressed by domestic conflict and angst over the incommensurability of his life with his beliefs, Tolstoy left home in secrecy in the autumn of 1910. His flight was immediately broadcast by the international media, which succeeded in tracking him down to the railway stop Astapovo (later renamed Leo Tolstoy), where he lay dying of congestive heart failure brought on by pneumonia. What could only be described as a media circus was assembled outside the stationmaster's house when Tolstoy died early in the morning of November 7,1910. His final words were "Truth, I love much."

Bibliography

Eikhenbaum, Boris. (1972). The Young Tolstoy, tr. Gary Kern. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

Eikhenbaum, Boris. (1982). Tolstoi in the Sixties, tr. Duffield White. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

Eikhenbaum, Boris. (1982). Tolstoi in the Seventies, tr. Albert Kaspin. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

Gustafson, Richard F. (1986). Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Morson, G. S. (1987). Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Orwin, Donna Tussing. (1993). Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847 - 1880. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Orwin, Donna Tussing, ed. (2002). Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wasiolek, Edward. (1978). Tolstoy's Major Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, A. N. (1988). Tolstoy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

—MICHAEL A. DENNER

Quotes:

"But the peasants -- how do the peasants die?"

"Though it is possible to utter words only with the intention to fulfill the will of God, it is very difficult not to think about the impression which they will produce on men and not to form them accordingly. But deeds you can do quite unknown to men, only for God. And such deeds are the greatest joy that a man can experience."

"All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style."

"The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes -- love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust."

"In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man."

See more famous quotes by Count Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy
Only color photograph of the novelist, shot at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908 by Prokudin-Gorskii, a pioneer of color photography
Born	September 9, 1828(1828-09-09) Yasnaya Polyana, Russia
Died	November 20, 1910 (aged 82) Astapovo, Russia
Occupation	Novelist
Genres	Realist
Notable work(s)	War and Peace Anna Karenina
Influences Petr Chelčický, Aleksandr Pushkin, Laurence Sterne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, Plato, Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, the Bible, Henry David Thoreau[citation needed]
Influenced Muhammad Iqbal, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Orhan Pamuk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov.
Signature

Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й​ (help·info), Russian pronunciation: [lʲɛv nʲɪkɐˈlaɪvʲɪtɕ tɐlˈstoj]; September 9 [O.S. August 28] 1828 – November 20 [O.S. November 7] 1910), was a Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist fiction.^{[citation needed]}. But realism is not the peculiar artistic feature in which Tolstoy excels, as other writers deepened his descriptions and were equally good at vivid description;^[1] rather, it is Tolstoy's gifted method of picturing life which most pleasingly and exactly corresponds to our sense of time.^[1]

Tolstoy's further talents as essayist, dramatist, and educational reformer made him the most influential member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Gandhi^[2] and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Novels and fictional works 3 Religious and political beliefs 4 Tolstoy on Shakespeare 5 Bibliography 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading

Early life

Tolstoy in military uniform, 1856

Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the Tula region of Russia. The Tolstoys were a well-known family of old Russian nobility; he was connected to the grandest of Russian aristocracy. Pushkin was his fourth cousin.

He was the fourth of five children of Countess Mariya Tolstaya (Volkonskaya). Tolstoy's parents died when he was young, so he and his siblings were brought up by relatives. In 1844, he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University. His teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." Tolstoy left university in the middle of his studies, returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent much of his time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his elder brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. Around this time, he started writing.

His conversion from a dissolute and privileged society author to the non-violent and spiritual anarchist of his latter days was brought about by two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860-61, a period when many liberal-leaning Russian aristocrats escaped the stifling political repression in Russia; others who followed the same path were Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that would mark the rest of his life. Writing in a letter to his friend V. P. Botkin:

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

His European trip in 1860-61 shaped both his political and literary transformation when he met Victor Hugo, whose literary talents Tolstoy praised after reading Hugo's newly finished Les Miserables. A comparison of Hugo's novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace shows the influence of the evocation of its battle scenes. Tolstoy's political philosophy was also influenced by a March 1861 visit to French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels. Apart from reviewing Proudhon's forthcoming publication, La Guerre et la Paix, whose title Tolstoy would borrow for his masterpiece, the two men discussed education, as Tolstoy wrote in his educational notebooks:

A portrait of Tolstoy's wife Sophia and their daughter Alexandra

If I recount this conversation with Proudhon, it is to show that, in my personal experience, he was the only man who understood the significance of education and of the printing press in our time.

Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded thirteen schools for his serfs' children, based on ground-breaking libertarian principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police, but as a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of libertarian education.

On 23 September 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Bers, the daughter of a court physician, who was 16 years his junior. (Sonya, the Russian dimunitive of Sofya, is the name that was used by her family and friends)^[3] They had thirteen children, five of whom died during childhood.^[4] The marriage was marked from the outset by sexual passion and emotional insensitivity when Tolstoy, on the eve of their marriage, gave her his diaries detailing his extensive sexual past and the fact that one of the serfs on his estate had borne him a son. ^[3] Even so, their early married life was ostensibly happy and allowed Tolstoy much freedom to compose the literary masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina with Sonya acting as his secretary, proof-reader and financial manager. ^[3] However, their later life together has been described by A. N. Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history. His relationship with his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical and he sought to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the renunciation of the copyrights on his earlier works.

Novels and fictional works

Tolstoy is one of the giants of Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina and novellas such as Hadji Murad and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Dostoevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists. Flaubert exclaimed, "What an artist and what a psychologist!". Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate, wrote, "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature."

Later critics and novelists continue to bear testament to Tolstoy's art. Virginia Woolf declared him the greatest of all novelists. James Joyce noted that, "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!". Thomas Mann wrote of Tolstoy's seemingly guileless artistry: "Seldom did art work so much like nature". Such sentiments were shared by the likes of Proust, Faulkner and Nabokov. The latter heaped superlatives upon The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina; he questioned, however, the reputation of War and Peace, and sharply criticized Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata.

Tolstoy's earliest works, the autobiographical novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the chasm between himself and his peasants. Though he later rejected them as sentimental, a great deal of Tolstoy's own life is revealed. They retain their relevance as accounts of the universal story of growing up.

Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastapol Sketches. His experiences in battle helped stir his subsequent pacifism and gave him material for realistic depiction of war's horrors in his later work.

His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. The Cossacks (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.

Tolstoy not only drew from his experience of life but created characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection.

An undated photograph of the novelist dressed for the Russian weather

War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. Tolstoy's original idea for the novel was to investigate the causes of the Decembrist revolt, to which it refers only in the last chapters, from which can be deduced that Andrei Bolkonski's son will become one of the Decembrists. The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. War and Peace (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that Anna Karenina was his first true novel.

After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and What Then Must We Do? develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.

For all the praise showered on Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Tolstoy rejected the two works later in his life as something not as true of reality. Such an argument is supported in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, whose main character continually battles with his family and servants, demanding honesty above the water and food needed to sustain him.

Religious and political beliefs

After reading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Tolstoy gradually became converted to the ascetic morality upheld in that work as the proper spiritual path for the upper classes:

Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never experienced before. ... no student has ever studied so much on his course, and learned so much, as I have this summer.

– Tolstoy's Letter to A.A. Fet, August 30, 1869

In Chapter VI of A Confession, Tolstoy quoted the final paragraph of Schopenhauer's work. It explained how the nothingness that results from complete denial of self is only a relative nothingness, and is not to be feared. The novelist was struck by the description of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu ascetic renunciation as being the path to holiness. After reading passages such as the following, which abound in Schopenhauer's ethical chapters, the Russian nobleman chose poverty and formal denial of the will:

But this very necessity of involuntary suffering (by poor people) for eternal salvation is also expressed by that utterance of the Savior (Matthew 19:24): "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Therefore those who were greatly in earnest about their eternal salvation, chose voluntary poverty when fate had denied this to them and they had been born in wealth. Thus Buddha Sakyamuni was born a prince, but voluntarily took to the mendicant's staff; and Francis of Assisi, the founder of the mendicant orders who, as a youngster at a ball, where the daughters of all the notabilities were sitting together, was asked: "Now Francis, will you not soon make your choice from these beauties?" and who replied: "I have made a far more beautiful choice!" "Whom?" "La poverta (poverty)": whereupon he abandoned every thing shortly afterwards and wandered through the land as a mendicant.

– Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, §170

Tolstoy's Christian beliefs centered on the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the injunction to turn the other cheek, which he saw as a justification for pacifism, nonviolence and nonresistance. Various versions of "Tolstoy's Bible" have been published, indicating the passages Tolstoy most relied on, specifically, the reported words of Jesus himself.^[5] Tolstoy believed being a Christian required him to be a pacifist; the consequences of being a pacifist, and the apparently inevitable waging of war by government, made him a philosophical anarchist.

Portrait of Tolstoy in 1887, by Ilya Repin

Tolstoy believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner self-perfection through following the Great Commandment of loving one's neighbor and God rather than looking outward to the Church or state for guidance and meaning.^{[citation needed]} His belief in nonresistance (nonviolence) when faced by conflict is another distinct attribute of his philosophy based on Christ's teachings.^{[citation needed]} By directly influencing Mahatma Gandhi with this idea through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You (full text of English translation available on Wikisource), Tolstoy has had a huge influence on the nonviolent resistance movement to this day. He believed that the aristocracy were a burden on the poor, and that the only solution to how we live together is through anarchism.^{[citation needed]} He also opposed private property^{[citation needed]} and the institution of marriage and valued the ideals of chastity and sexual abstinence (discussed in Father Sergius and his preface to The Kreutzer Sonata), ideals also held by the young Gandhi. Tolstoy's later work is often criticised as being overly didactic and patchily written,^{[citation needed]} but derives a passion and verve from the depth of his austere moral views.^{[citation needed]} The sequence of the temptation of Sergius in Father Sergius, for example, is among his later triumphs. Gorky relates how Tolstoy once read this passage before himself and Chekhov and that Tolstoy was moved to tears by the end of the reading. Other later passages of rare power include the crises of self faced by the protagonists of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man, where the main character in the former or the reader in the latter is made aware of the foolishness of the protagonists' lives.

Tolstoy had a profound influence on the development of anarchist thought. The Tolstoyans were a small Christian anarchist group formed by Tolstoy's companion, Vladimir Chertkov (1854 - 1936), in order to spread Tolstoy's religious teachings. Prince Peter Kropotkin wrote of Tolstoy in the article on anarchism in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica:

Without naming himself an anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, like his predecessors in the popular religious movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Chojecki, Denk and many others, took the anarchist position as regards the state and property rights, deducing his conclusions from the general spirit of the teachings of Jesus and from the necessary dictates of reason. With all the might of his talent he made (especially in The Kingdom of God is Within You) a powerful criticism of the church, the state and law altogether, and especially of the present property laws. He describes the state as the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force. Robbers, he says, are far less dangerous than a well-organized government. He makes a searching criticism of the prejudices which are current now concerning the benefits conferred upon men by the church, the state and the existing distribution of property, and from the teachings of Jesus he deduces the rule of non-resistance and the absolute condemnation of all wars. His religious arguments are, however, so well combined with arguments borrowed from a dispassionate observation of the present evils, that the anarchist portions of his works appeal to the religious and the non-religious reader alike.

In hundreds of essays over the last twenty years of his life, Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of the State and recommended books by Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, whilst rejecting anarchism's espousal of violent revolutionary means, writing in the 1900 essay, "On Anarchy":

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power ... There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.

Despite his misgivings about anarchist violence, Tolstoy took risks to circulate the prohibited publications of anarchist thinkers in Russia, and corrected the proofs of Kropotkin's "Words of a Rebel", illegally published in St Petersburg in 1906.

A letter Tolstoy wrote in 1908 to an Indian newspaper entitled "A Letter to a Hindu" resulted in intense correspondence with Mohandas Gandhi, who was in South Africa at the time and was beginning to become an activist. Reading The Kingdom of God is Within You had convinced Gandhi to abandon violence and espouse nonviolent resistance, a debt Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi would only last a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to give the name the Tolstoy Colony to his second ashram in South Africa. Besides non-violent resistance, the two men shared a common belief in the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy's essays.^[6] Along with his growing idealism, Tolstoy also became a major supporter of the Esperanto movement. Tolstoy was impressed by the pacifist beliefs of the Doukhobors and brought their persecution to the attention of the international community, after they burned their weapons in peaceful protest in 1895. He aided the Doukhobors in migrating to Canada.

Tolstoy's house at Yasnaya Polyana, today a museum which includes his library of 22,000 volumes

In 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy condemned the war and wrote to the Japanese Buddhist priest Soyen Shaku in a failed attempt to make a joint pacifist statement.

Tolstoy was a wealthy member of the Russian nobility. He came to believe that he was undeserving of his inherited wealth, and was renowned among the peasantry for his generosity. He would frequently return to his country estate with vagrants whom he felt needed a helping hand, and would often dispense large sums of money to street beggars while on trips to the city, much to his wife's chagrin.^{[citation needed]}

He died of pneumonia^{[citation needed]} at Astapovo station in 1910 after leaving home in the middle of winter at the age of 82. His death came only days after gathering the nerve to abandon his family and wealth^{[citation needed]} and take up the path of a wandering ascetic;^{[citation needed]} a path that he had agonized over pursuing for decades. He had not been at the peak of health before leaving home, his wife and daughters were all actively engaged in caring for him daily. He had been speaking and writing of his own death in the days preceding his departure from home, but fell ill at the train station not far from home. The station master took Tolstoy to his apartment, where his personal doctors were called to the scene. He was given injections of morphine and camphor. The police tried to limit access to his funeral procession, but thousands of peasants lined the streets at his funeral. Still, some peasants were heard to say that, other than knowing that "some nobleman had died," they knew little else about Tolstoy.^[7]

Tolstoy on Shakespeare

During his life, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that William Shakespeare was a bad dramatist and not a true artist at all. Tolstoy explained his views in a critical essay on Shakespeare written in 1903.

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear", "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium...

Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the "Henrys," "Troilus and Cressida," the "Tempest," "Cymbeline," and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their esthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth.
Tolstoy on Shakespeare. 1906.

Understanding that his conclusions contradict popular opinion, Tolstoy supported his opinion by detailed analysis of King Lear.

George Orwell wrote a well-known response to this, Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.

Bibliography

Ivan Mozzhukhin in a 1917 screen version of Tolstoy's short story, Father Sergius

Tolstoy commemorated on a Soviet stamp issued in 1978

Main article: Bibliography of Leo Tolstoy

Novels and novellas

• Childhood (Детство [Detstvo]; 1852)
• Boyhood (Отрочество [Otrochestvo]; 1854)
• Youth (Юность [Yunost']; 1856)
• Family Happiness (novella, 1859)
• The Cossacks (Казаки [Kazaki]; 1863)
• War and Peace (Война и мир [Voyna i mir]; 1865–1869)
• Anna Karenina (Анна Каренина [Anna Karenina]; 1875-77)
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Смерть Ивана Ильича [Smert' Ivana Il'icha]; novella, 1887)
• The Kreutzer Sonata (Крейцерова соната [Kreitserova Sonata]; 1889)
• Resurrection (Воскресение [Voskresenie]; 1899)
• Hadji Murat (Хаджи-Мурат [Khadzhi-Murat]; written in 1896-1904, published 1912)

Short stories

• The Raid (1852)
• Sevastopol Stories (Севастопольские рассказы [Sevastopolskie Rasskazy]; 1855-56)
• Ivan the Fool: A Lost Opportunity (1863)
• Polikushka (1863)
• The Prisoner in the Caucasus (Кавказский Пленник [Kavkazskii Plennik]; 1872)
• Strider: The Story of a Horse (1864, 1886)
• How Much Land Does a Man Need? (Много ли человеку земли нужно [Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno]; 1886)
• Master and Man (1895)
• Father Sergius (Отец Сергий [Otets Sergii] (1898)

Plays

• The Power of Darkness (Власть тьмы [Vlast' t'my] (tragedy, 1886)
• The Fruits of Enlightenment (comedy, 1889)
• The Living Corpse (Живой труп [Zhivoi trup] (1900)

Non-fiction

• A Confession (Исповедь [Ispoved']; 1882)
• What I Believe (also called My Religion) (В чём моя вера [V chem moya vera]; 1884) (What I Believe and My Religion available at Wikisource)
• What Is to Be Done? (1886)
• The Kingdom of God is Within You (Царство Божие внутри вас [Tsarstvo Bozhiye vnutri vas]; 1894) (available at wikisource)
• The Gospel in Brief (1896)
• What Is Art? (1897)
• Letter to the Liberals (1898)
• The law of love and the law of violence; published in 1940 complete text

See also

• Tolstoy syndrome

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, p.141
2. ^ Martin E. Hellman, Resist Not Evil in World Without Violence (Arun Gandhi ed.), M.K. Gandhi Institute, 1994, retrieved on 14 December 2006]
3. ^ ^{a b c} Susan Jacoby, "The Wife of the Genius" (April 19, 1981) The New York Times
4. ^ Feuer,Kathryn B. Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, Cornell University Press, 1996, ISBN 0801419026
5. ^ Orwin, Donna T. The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. Cambridge University Press, 2002
6. ^ Leo Tolstoy, The First Step, Preface to the Russian translation of Howard William’s The Ethics of Diet, 1892.
7. ^ Tolstaya, S.A. The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, Book Sales, 1987; Chertkov, V. "The Last Days of Leo Tolstoy," http://www.linguadex.com/tolstoy/index.html, translated by Benjamin Scher

Further reading

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Quotations from Wikiquote
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons

Universal and museum websites on Leo Tolstoy

• Leo Tolstoy - A comprehensive site with pictures, e-texts, biography, genealogy, etc.
• Leo Tolstoy museum in Yasnaya Polyana
• Tolstoy Image Gallery
• (Russian)State Leo Tolstoy Museum in Moscow

Leo Tolstoy's biography and critique

• Illustrated Biography online at University of Virginia
• Brief bio
• Leo Tolstoy's Life - Tolstoy's personal, professional and world event timeline, and synopsis of his life from Masterpiece Theatre.
• The Last Days of Leo Tolstoy
• Aleksandra Tolstaya, "Tragedy of Tolstoy"
• (Russian) The World of Leo Tolstoy
• Information and Critique on Leo Tolstoy
• Tolstoy's Legacy for Mankind: A Manifesto for Nonviolence, Part 1
• Tolstoy's Legacy for Mankind: A Manifesto for Nonviolence, Part 2
• Text of "A Confession" and Audio of Tolstoy speaking on TheGodLight.co.uk

E-texts of works by Leo Tolstoy

• At Project Gutenberg
• Works by Leo Tolstoy at University of Virginia
• Leo Tolstoy at Great Books Online
• (Russian) A lot of works by Leo Tolstoy in the original Russian
• Links to works online
• Tolstoy at CCEL
• What I Believe - works by Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy in the media

• Leo Tolstoy at the Internet Movie Database
• Alexander II and His Times: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky

v • d • e Works by Leo Tolstoy Biography · Bibliography · Tolstoyan · Tolstoy · Texts Novels and novellas Childhood (1852) · Boyhood (1854) · Youth (1856) · Family Happiness (1859) · The Cossacks (1863) · War and Peace (1869) · Anna Karenina (1877) · The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) · The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) · Resurrection (1899) · The Forged Coupon (1911) · Hadji Murat (1912) Philosophical works A Confession · What I Believe · What Is to Be Done? · The Kingdom of God Is Within You · The Gospel in Brief · What Is Art? · A Calendar of Wisdom Plays The Power of Darkness · The Fruits of Enlightenment · The Living Corpse Short stories "Albert" · "Alyosha the Pot" · "Croesus and Fate" · "The Big Oven" · "Father Sergius" · "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" · "The Grain" · "Ivan the Fool" · "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" · "Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse" · "Korney Vasilyev" · "The Kreutzer Sonata" · "Master and Man" · "Polikushka" · "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" · "Promoting a Devil" · "Quench the Spark" · "The Raid" · "Repentance" · "Sebastopol Sketches" · "Three Deaths" · "The Three Questions" · "Too Dear!" · "Two Hussars" · "What Men Live By" · "Where Love is, God is" · "Wisdom of Children" · "Work, Death, and Sickness"

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