TOLSTOY, LEO

TOLSTOY, LEO (in Russian, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy; 1828–1910), Russian novelist and moral philosopher.

Leo Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman, was born at his family's estate, Yasnaya Polyana ("clear glade"), on 9 September (28 August, old style) 1828. Orphaned by age ten, he was raised by close relatives. While at Kazan University, he read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, which exerted a profound and lifelong influence on him. Rejecting what he perceived as a trivial education, Tolstoy broke off his studies and eventually followed his brother Nikolai to the Crimea to serve in the elite artillery corps.

life and works

In the Crimea Tolstoy's literary career began in earnest, with the publication of the autobiographical trilogy Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857), and the remarkable Sevastopol Stories (1855–1856). In late 1859, contemptuous of the vagaries of the writer's life, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana intent on bettering the lives of his own peasants. He married Sophia Andreyevna Bers in 1862; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote The Cossacks (1863), and then began his stupendous historical novel War and Peace, written and published between 1865 and 1869. It provoked lively and heated critical debate. He followed it with a tale of modern society, Anna Karenina (1875–1877), which was published serially to good reviews.

In the late 1870s, seized by a profound feeling of hopelessness in the face of the eventuality of death, Tolstoy embarked on a religious transformation detailed in the profound and controversial Confession (1879). The essential elements of Tolstoy's new religious ideas can be found in a trilogy: An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology (1880), A Translation and Harmony of the Four Gospels (1882–1884), and What I Believe (1884). The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) details Tolstoy's doctrine of pacifism. Tolstoy's crisis was both aesthetic and moral, so his literary works took on a more overtly didactic tone. Masterful stories of this period include "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (1886), "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886), and "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1891). Master and Man (1895) portrays a man's deathbed conversion. The less successful Resurrection (1899) concerns an impassioned search for justice. Tolstoy's famous work of literary criticism, What Is Art? (1898), vituperatively condemns much of world literature—Tolstoy's own contribution as well as William Shakespeare's—as elitist and corrupting. Art, he argued, should not seduce for the sake of enjoyment, but should edify the masses by infecting them with sympathetic feelings.

Tolstoy's outspoken repudiation of government and church responses to social crises contributed to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. His masterful novel Hadji Murat (1904) concerns a protracted war between Caucasian mountaineers and the Russians. Seeking to free himself of the wealth, privilege, and fame that overwhelmed him, Tolstoy left home and died at Astapovo railway station on 20 November (7 November, old style) 1910. At the time of his death Tolstoy was a figure of world renown and an ambivalent leader of his own religious movement. Thousands of Russian peasants accompanied his funeral procession, and the demise of this giant of a man was felt by many to be the passing of a whole era.

contributions to literature

Tolstoy discovered new forms for the novel. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, War and Peace depicts the lives of three families. Compared by

Tolstoy himself to Homer's Iliad, the subject of the novel is "life itself," conveyed by Tolstoy through precise detail and sweeping description. Anna Karenina, lauded as one of the world's greatest novels, contrasts the eponymous heroine's adulterous relationship with two other, more or less ideal, marriages. Even upon the publication of Childhood, however, Tolstoy was heralded as a great new literary talent for his extraordinary ability to convey every nuance of conscious thought. His works are rife with luminous moments where the individual's existence melds harmoniously with all creation, as when Levin is mowing hay in Anna Karenina, or Prince Andrei lies dying on the battlefield in War and Peace. Also central to Tolstoy's thought is a strain of anti-individualism that intensifies with time. It manifests itself in his critique of the "great men" theory of historical causation.

For Tolstoy, there exists an eternal truth that is the same for all people in all times. One merely needs to discover what that truth is and live in complete harmony with it. Through most of Tolstoy's literary career, apprehension of the truth occurs through aesthetic means, most insistently through defamiliarization (ostranenie), a method that exposes society's conventions by making them "strange." This device is famously employed in War and Peace, for example, in the scene in which Natasha attends the opera for the first time. Tolstoy also employs repetition, enumeration, and logical sequencing. He effects narrative shifts in point of view that are held together by an omniscient narrator who as often as not contains a measure of the personality of Tolstoy himself. In his postconversion works the aesthetic element is often dominated by social and political commentary, although the best works, such as Hadji Murat, achieve universal clarity.

contributions to social, political, and religious thought

While at times sympathetic to radicals, liberals, and conservatives, Tolstoy largely remained at odds with the main currents of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual thought. Akin to an eighteenth-century philosophe, Tolstoy, a fierce believer in the equality of all people, envisioned and put into practice at times utopian social and educational reforms. Although he eventually came to a wholesale rejection of his class's way of life, in less dogmatic moments he believed that with privilege came the responsibility to educate those less fortunate than oneself.

After his moral crisis of 1880, Tolstoy came to embrace Christian anarchism. He interpreted Christ's injunction to turn the other cheek as a summons to nonviolent protest against injustice. Tolstoy tended to follow any idea through to its logical conclusions, even if that led him to extreme, even contradictory, positions. For example, he spoke out not against revolutionaries' violent tactics, but against the government's execution of the revolutionaries. He used his notoriety to rail against the legal system, the prisons, private property, the bureaucracy, marriage, education, and agriculture. Tolstoy's pacifism had a profound influence on Mahatma Gandhi, spiritual and political leader of India.

See alsoChekhov, Anton; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor; Pacifism; Russia; Turgenev, Ivan.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Tolstoy, Leo. Polnoe sobranie sochenenii. Edited by V. G. Chertkov. 90 vols. Moscow, 1928–1958. Definitive Russian edition of Tolstoy's works.

——. Tolstoy Centenary Edition. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. 21 vols. London, 1929–1937. Comprehensive, though incomplete, set of translations.

——. Anna Karenina. Translated by Constance Garnett. Edited and translation revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova. New York, 1965. Reprint, 1993.

——. Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York, 1967.

——. War and Peace. Translated by Ann Dunnigan. New York, 1968. Reprint, 1993.

Secondary Sources

Bloom, Harold, ed. Leo Tolstoy: Modern Critical Views. New York, 1986. Excellent articles by distinguished scholars on key aspects of Tolstoy's work.

Orwin, Donna Tussing. Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847–1880. Princeton, N.J., 1993. Brilliant study of the ideas that led Tolstoy to write his masterpieces.

Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn., 1996. Good overall interpretation of Tolstoy's works.

The Tolstoy Studies Journal. Toronto, 1998–. Good source for contemporary scholarly articles on Tolstoy.

Sarah A. Krive