Count Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, Count Rus. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoi (lyĕf), 1828-1910, Russian novelist and philosopher, considered one of the world's greatest writers.

Early Life

Of a noble family, Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his parents' estate near Tula. Orphaned at nine, he was brought up by his aunts and privately tutored. At 16 he was sent to the Univ. of Kazan, where he studied languages and law. His classes bored him, and he left without a degree. He returned to his estate in 1849 and made several abortive attempts to aid and educate the serfs there. Tolstoy then began a profligate life in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Early Works

In 1851 Tolstoy followed his brother into army service in the Caucasus, where he wrote Childhood (1852). This became the first part of an autobiographical trilogy, which includes Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857). In 1854 he took part in the defense of Sevastopol, descriptions of which were published in Nekrasov's journal The Contemporary, attracting considerable attention for their unvarnished picture of war. He left army service in 1855 and for several years divided his time between his estate and the literary circles of St. Petersburg. His diary of the period reveals his intense dissatisfaction with his libertine existence. He set up a school for peasant children on his estate, emphasizing a spontaneous approach to learning. When his school proved impractical, he visited Western Europe and there began to question the bases of modern civilization.

In 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Andreyevna Bers, a young, well-educated woman who bore him 13 children. His candor concerning his infidelities and his harsh conception of her wifely duties contributed to the instability of their marriage. During this time he wrote The Cossacks (1863) and his masterpieces War and Peace (1862-69) and Anna Karenina (1873-76). War and Peace is a vast prose epic of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. It illustrates Tolstoy's view of history as proceeding inexorably to its own ends, a view in which mankind appears as an accidental instrument. This thesis is conveyed by a stream of brilliantly conceived characters and incidents. Anna Karenina, his most popular work, concerns the tragedy of a woman's faith in romantic love.

Later Life and Works

About 1876 the doubts that had beset Tolstoy since youth, fed by his puritan temperament in conflict with his sensuality, gathered force. The result of his painful self-examination was his conversion to the doctrine of Christian love and acceptance of the principle of nonresistance to evil. The steps in his conversion are set forth in his Confession (1879). For the rest of his life Tolstoy dedicated himself to the practice and propagation of his new faith, which he expounded in a series of works, 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).

Tolstoy preached nonviolence and a Rousseauistic simplicity of life. He was an anarchist to the extent that he considered wrong all organizations based on the premise of force, including both the government and the church. A Tolstoy cult grew up in Russia and abroad, and his estate became a place of pilgrimage. Because of his prestige the government did not interfere with his activities, although the Russian Church excommunicated him in 1901.

Moral questions are central to Tolstoy's later works, which include the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1884), the drama The Power of Darkness (1886), and the novel The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). To his last period belongs the essay What Is Art ? (1897-98), in which he argued for the moral responsibility of the artist to make his work understandable to most people; he denounced acknowledged masterpieces, including his own earlier works. His last works also include the novels Hadji Murad (1896-1904) and Resurrection (1899-1900) and the drama The Living Corpse (pub. 1911).

Tolstoy's insistence on putting his beliefs into practice and abandoning all earthly goods led to a permanent breach between himself and his wife. His children, with the exception of the youngest daughter, Alexandra, sided with their mother. In 1910, at 83, Tolstoy left home with Alexandra without a specific destination. He caught a chill and died at the railroad stationmaster's house at Astapovo.

Bibliography

Tolstoy's works are available in many English translations. See also the reminiscences of his wife, Sophia (tr. 1928 and 1936); his children Sergei (tr. 1926), Tatiana (tr. 1951), Ilya (tr. 1971), and Alexandra (tr. 1953, repr. 1973); his friends M. Gorky (tr. 1920), A. B. Goldenweizer (tr. 1923, repr. 1969), V. Bulgakov (tr. 1971), and V. G. Chertkov (tr. 1922, repr. 1973); biographies by A. Maude (1931), E. J. Simmons (1946), and H. Troyat (tr. 1967); collections of critical essays, ed. by R. E. Matlaw (1967) and by H. Gifford (1972); I. Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953); W. L. Shirer, Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy (1994).

Tolstoy, Leo Nikolaivich, Count (1828–1910), Russian novelist, critic, and dramatist. Under the influence of Turgenev and Ostrovsky, he started some comedies in the 1850s, which, however, remained unfinished. It was not until 1886 that he once more turned to the theatre, and by then his whole philosophy of life had changed. Under the influence of M. V. Lentovsky, Director of one of the Moscow People's Theatres, he wrote The Power of Darkness, possibly the most forceful peasant play ever written. Its main outline was taken from a criminal case heard at Tula, but in Tolstoy's hands it became a stark naturalistic document which was for many years banned by the censor and first acted abroad, in Paris in 1888 under Antoine, and in Berlin by the Freie Bühne in 1890. It was not seen in Russia until 1895, when it was staged both at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg (now the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad) and at the Moscow Maly. It was first seen in London in 1904, and in New York in 1920. Tolstoy's next play, a short comedy entitled The First Distiller (1887) which attacked alcoholism, was followed by The Fruits of Enlightenment, a comedy which satirizes the parasitic life of the country gentry. Published in 1891, it was produced in the same year by Stanislavsky, and the following year was seen at the Maly, with little success. Even the actors at the Moscow Art Theatre, where the play was revived some years later, could not at first tackle the peasant characters successfully, and many years of experiment and experience were needed before Tolstoy's famous drama could be adequately portrayed. It was first seen in London in 1928. Tolstoy's last two plays, published in 1912, were left unfinished at his death. Redemption (or The Living Corpse), an attack on the evils of contemporary Russian marriage laws, was produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1911; John Barrymore played the hero, Fedya, in New York in 1918, Donald Wolfit in London in 1946. The Light that Shines in Darkness, in which the useless life of a wealthy family is contrasted with that of the poverty-stricken and overworked peasants, does not appear to have been staged. Three of Tolstoy's novels, Resurrection, Anna Karenina, and War and Peace, were dramatized and produced at the Moscow Art Theatre, and the last two have also been staged in English.

Tolstoy, Leo Nikolaievich, Count (1828–1910) Russian novelist, moralist, and mystic. He took part in the defence of Sebastopol during the Crimean War (1853–56). In 1862, Tolstoy married and settled down on his Volga estate, where he wrote the masterpiece War and Peace (1865–69) – an epic account of the Napeolonic Wars. Tolstoy's most popular work, Anna Karenina (1875–77), is a tragic love story. In his Confession (1879), Tolstoy outlines his conversion to an extreme form of Christian anarchism. He renounced all property and possessions and espoused total pacifism. Tolstoy's later moral works include the story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and the novel The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). See also Russian literature