Leo
Tolstoy
Russian
writer
Quick
Facts
Tolstoy
also spelled: Tolstoi
Russian
in full: Lev Nikolayevich, Graf (count) Tolstoy
Born:
August 28 [September 9, New Style], 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province,
Russian Empire
Died:
November 7 [November 20], 1910, Astapovo, Ryazan province (aged 82)
Notable
Works: “An Examination of Dogmatic Theology” “Anna Karenina” “Boyhood”
“Childhood” “Father Sergius” “Hadji-Murad” “Kholstomer” “My Confession”
“Resurrection” “Sevastopol in August” “Sevastopol in December” “Sevastopol in
May” “The Cossacks” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” “The Kingdom of God Is Within
You” “The Kreutzer Sonata” “The Living Corpse” “The Power of Darkness” “The
Raid” “Three Deaths” “Union and Translation of the Four Gospels” “War and
Peace” “What I Believe” “What Is Art?” “Yasnaya Polyana” “Youth”
Movement
/ Style: realism
Top
Questions
Why is
Leo Tolstoy significant?
Russian
author Leo Tolstoy is considered a master of realistic fiction and one of the
world’s greatest novelists, especially known for Anna Karenina and War and
Peace. Oscillating between skepticism and dogmatism, he explored the most
diverse approaches to human experience. His works have been praised as pieces
of life, not pieces of art.
What was
Leo Tolstoy’s childhood like?
Leo
Tolstoy was born in 1828, the scion of aristocrats. His mother died before he
was two years old, and his father passed away in 1837. After two other
guardians died, Tolstoy lived with an aunt in Kazan, Russia. According to
Tolstoy, his cousin Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya had the greatest
influence on his childhood.
How did
Leo Tolstoy die?
Upset by
an unhappy marriage and by the contradiction between his life and his
principles, Leo Tolstoy left his family’s estate in 1910. Despite his stealth,
the press began reporting on his movements. He soon contracted pneumonia and
died of heart failure at a railroad station in Astapovo, Russia. He was 82.
eo
Tolstoy (born August 28 [September 9, New Style], 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula
province, Russian Empire—died November 7 [November 20], 1910, Astapovo, Ryazan
province) was a Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the
world’s greatest novelists.
Tolstoy
is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna
Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever
written. War and Peace in particular seems virtually to define this form for
many readers and critics. Among Tolstoy’s shorter works, The Death of Ivan
Ilyich (1886) is usually classed among the best examples of the novella.
Especially during his last three decades Tolstoy also achieved world renown as
a moral and religious teacher. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil had an
important influence on Gandhi. Although Tolstoy’s religious ideas no longer
command the respect they once did, interest in his life and personality has, if
anything, increased over the years.
Most
readers will agree with the assessment of the 19th-century British poet and
critic Matthew Arnold that a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece
of life; the Russian author Isaak Babel commented that, if the world could
write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Critics of diverse schools have
agreed that somehow Tolstoy’s works seem to elude all artifice. Most have
stressed his ability to observe the smallest changes of consciousness and to
record the slightest movements of the body. What another novelist would
describe as a single act of consciousness, Tolstoy convincingly breaks down
into a series of infinitesimally small steps. According to the English writer
Virginia Woolf, who took for granted that Tolstoy was “the greatest of all
novelists,” these observational powers elicited a kind of fear in readers, who
“wish to escape from the gaze which Tolstoy fixes on us.” Those who visited
Tolstoy as an old man also reported feelings of great discomfort when he
appeared to understand their unspoken thoughts. It was commonplace to describe
him as godlike in his powers and titanic in his struggles to escape the
limitations of the human condition. Some viewed Tolstoy as the embodiment of
nature and pure vitality, others saw him as the incarnation of the world’s
conscience, but for almost all who knew him or read his works, he was not just
one of the greatest writers who ever lived but a living symbol of the search
for life’s meaning.
Early
years
Yasnaya
Polyana: estate of Leo Tolstoy
Yasnaya
Polyana: estate of Leo TolstoyEstate of Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, Russia.
The scion
of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy was born at the family estate, about 130
miles (210 kilometres) south of Moscow, where he was to live the better part of
his life and write his most-important works. His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna,
née Princess Volkonskaya, died before he was two years old, and his father
Nikolay Ilich, Graf (count) Tolstoy, followed her in 1837. His grandmother died
11 months later, and then his next guardian, his aunt Aleksandra, in 1841.
Tolstoy and his four siblings were then transferred to the care of another aunt
in Kazan, in western Russia. Tolstoy remembered a cousin who lived at Yasnaya
Polyana, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya (“Aunt Toinette,” as he called her),
as the greatest influence on his childhood, and later, as a young man, Tolstoy
wrote some of his most-touching letters to her. Despite the constant presence
of death, Tolstoy remembered his childhood in idyllic terms. His first
published work, Detstvo (1852; Childhood), was a fictionalized and nostalgic
account of his early years.
Educated
at home by tutors, Tolstoy enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1844 as a
student of Oriental languages. His poor record soon forced him to transfer to
the less-demanding law faculty, where he wrote a comparison of the French
political philosopher Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws and Catherine the
Great’s nakaz (instructions for a law code). Interested in literature and
ethics, he was drawn to the works of the English novelists Laurence Sterne and
Charles Dickens and, especially, to the writings of the French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; in place of a cross, he wore a medallion with a portrait
of Rousseau. But he spent most of his time trying to be comme il faut (socially
correct), drinking, gambling, and engaging in debauchery. After leaving the university
in 1847 without a degree, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana, where he planned
to educate himself, to manage his estate, and to improve the lot of his serfs.
Despite frequent resolutions to change his ways, he continued his loose life
during stays in Tula, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. In 1851 he joined his older
brother Nikolay, an army officer, in the Caucasus and then entered the army
himself. He took part in campaigns against the native peoples and, soon after,
in the Crimean War (1853–56).
In 1847
Tolstoy began keeping a diary, which became his laboratory for experiments in
self-analysis and, later, for his fiction. With some interruptions, Tolstoy
kept his diaries throughout his life, and he is therefore one of the most
copiously documented writers who ever lived. Reflecting the life he was
leading, his first diary begins by confiding that he may have contracted a
venereal disease. The early diaries record a fascination with rule-making, as
Tolstoy composed rules for diverse aspects of social and moral behaviour. They
also record the writer’s repeated failure to honour these rules, his attempts
to formulate new ones designed to ensure obedience to old ones, and his
frequent acts of self-castigation. Tolstoy’s later belief that life is too complex
and disordered ever to conform to rules or philosophical systems perhaps
derives from these futile attempts at self-regulation.
First
publications of Leo Tolstoy
.jfif)
Concealing
his identity, Tolstoy submitted Childhood for publication in Sovremennik (“The
Contemporary”), a prominent journal edited by the poet Nikolay Nekrasov.
Nekrasov was enthusiastic, and the pseudonymously published work was widely
praised. During the next few years Tolstoy published a number of stories based
on his experiences in the Caucasus, including “Nabeg” (1853; “The Raid”) and
his three sketches about the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War:
“Sevastopol v dekabre mesyatse” (“Sevastopol in December”), “Sevastopol v maye”
(“Sevastopol in May”), and “Sevastopol v avguste 1855 goda” (“Sevastopol in
August”; all published 1855–56). The first sketch, which deals with the courage
of simple soldiers, was praised by the tsar. Written in the second person as if
it were a tour guide, this story also demonstrates Tolstoy’s keen interest in
formal experimentation and his lifelong concern with the morality of observing
other people’s suffering. The second sketch includes a lengthy passage of a
soldier’s stream of consciousness (one of the early uses of this device) in the
instant before he is killed by a bomb. In the story’s famous ending, the
author, after commenting that none of his characters are truly heroic, asserts
that
the hero
of my story—whom I love with all the power of my soul…who was, is, and ever
will be beautiful—is the truth.
Readers
ever since have remarked on Tolstoy’s ability to make such “absolute language,”
which usually ruins realistic fiction, aesthetically effective.
After the
Crimean War Tolstoy resigned from the army and was at first hailed by the
literary world of St. Petersburg. But his prickly vanity, his refusal to join
any intellectual camp, and his insistence on his complete independence soon
earned him the dislike of the radical intelligentsia. He was to remain
throughout his life an “archaist,” opposed to prevailing intellectual trends.
In 1857 Tolstoy traveled to Paris and returned after having gambled away his
money.
After his
return to Russia, he decided that his real vocation was pedagogy, and so he
organized a school for peasant children on his estate. After touring western
Europe to study pedagogical theory and practice, he published 12 issues of a
journal, Yasnaya Polyana (1862–63), which included his provocative articles
“Progress i opredeleniye obrazovaniya” (“Progress and the Definition of Education”),
which denies that history has any underlying laws, and “Komu u kogu uchitsya
pisat, krestyanskim rebyatam u nas ili nam u krestyanskikh rebyat?” (“Who
Should Learn Writing of Whom: Peasant Children of Us, or We of Peasant
Children?”), which reverses the usual answer to the question. Tolstoy married
Sofya (Sonya) Andreyevna Bers, the daughter of a prominent Moscow physician, in
1862 and soon transferred all his energies to his marriage and the composition
of War and Peace. Tolstoy and his wife had 13 children, of whom 10 survived
infancy.
Tolstoy’s
works during the late 1850s and early 1860s experimented with new forms for
expressing his moral and philosophical concerns. To Childhood he soon added
Otrochestvo (1854; Boyhood) and Yunost (1857; Youth). A number of stories
centre on a single semiautobiographical character, Dmitry Nekhlyudov, who later
reappeared as the hero of Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection. In “Lyutsern” (1857;
“Lucerne”), Tolstoy uses the diary form first to relate an incident, then to reflect
on its timeless meaning, and finally to reflect on the process of his own
reflections. “Tri smerti” (1859; “Three Deaths”) describes the deaths of a
noblewoman who cannot face the fact that she is dying, of a peasant who accepts
death simply, and, at last, of a tree, whose utterly natural end contrasts with
human artifice. Only the author’s transcendent consciousness unites these three
events.
“Kholstomer”
(written 1863; revised and published 1886; “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse”)
has become famous for its dramatic use of a favourite Tolstoyan device,
“defamiliarization”—that is, the description of familiar social practices from
the “naive” perspective of an observer who does not take them for granted.
Readers were shocked to discover that the protagonist and principal narrator of
“Kholstomer” was an old horse. Like so many of Tolstoy’s early works, this
story satirizes the artifice and conventionality of human society, a theme that
also dominates Tolstoy’s novel Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks). The hero of this
work, the dissolute and self-centred aristocrat Dmitry Olenin, enlists as a
cadet to serve in the Caucasus. Living among the Cossacks, he comes to
appreciate a life more in touch with natural and biological rhythms. In the
novel’s central scene, Olenin, hunting in the woods, senses that every living
creature, even a mosquito, “is just such a separate Dmitry Olenin as I am
myself.” Recognizing the futility of his past life, he resolves to live
entirely for others.
The
period of the great novels (1863–77)
Happily
married and ensconced with his wife and family at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy
reached the height of his creative powers. He devoted the remaining years of
the 1860s to writing War and Peace. Then, after an interlude during which he
considered writing a novel about Peter the Great and briefly returned to
pedagogy (bringing out reading primers that were widely used), Tolstoy wrote
his other great novel, Anna Karenina. These two works share a vision of human
experience rooted in an appreciation of everyday life and prosaic virtues.
War and
Peace
Voyna i
mir (1865–69; War and Peace) contains three kinds of material—a historical
account of the Napoleonic wars, the biographies of fictional characters, and a
set of essays about the philosophy of history. Critics from the 1860s to the
present have wondered how these three parts cohere, and many have faulted
Tolstoy for including the lengthy essays, but readers continue to respond to
them with undiminished enthusiasm.
The
work’s historical portions narrate the campaign of 1805 leading to Napoleon’s
victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, a period of peace, and Napoleon’s invasion
of Russia in 1812. Contrary to generally accepted views, Tolstoy portrays
Napoleon as an ineffective, egomaniacal buffoon, Tsar Alexander I as a
phrasemaker obsessed with how historians will describe him, and the Russian
general Mikhail Kutuzov (previously disparaged) as a patient old man who
understands the limitations of human will and planning. Particularly noteworthy
are the novel’s battle scenes, which show combat as sheer chaos. Generals may
imagine they can “anticipate all contingencies,” but battle is really the
result of “a hundred million diverse chances” decided on the moment by
unforeseeable circumstances. In war as in life, no system or model can come
close to accounting for the infinite complexity of human behaviour.
Among the
book’s fictional characters, the reader’s attention is first focused on Prince
Andrey Bolkonsky, a proud man who has come to despise everything fake, shallow,
or merely conventional. Recognizing the artifice of high society, he joins the
army to achieve glory, which he regards as truly meaningful. Badly wounded at
Austerlitz, he comes to see glory and Napoleon as no less petty than the salons
of St. Petersburg. As the novel progresses, Prince Andrey repeatedly discovers
the emptiness of the activities to which he has devoted himself. Tolstoy’s
description of his death in 1812 is usually regarded as one of the
most-effective scenes in Russian literature.
The
novel’s other hero, the bumbling and sincere Pierre Bezukhov, oscillates
between belief in some philosophical system promising to resolve all questions
and a relativism so total as to leave him in apathetic despair. He at last
discovers the Tolstoyan truth that wisdom is to be found not in systems but in
the ordinary processes of daily life, especially in his marriage to the novel’s
most-memorable heroine, Natasha. When the book stops—it does not really end but
just breaks off—Pierre seems to be forgetting this lesson in his enthusiasm for
a new utopian plan.
In accord
with Tolstoy’s idea that prosaic, everyday activities make a life good or bad,
the book’s truly wise characters are not its intellectuals but a simple, decent
soldier, Natasha’s brother Nikolay, and a generous pious woman, Andrey’s sister
Marya. Their marriage symbolizes the novel’s central prosaic values.
The
essays in War and Peace, which begin in the second half of the book, satirize
all attempts to formulate general laws of history and reject the ill-considered
assumptions supporting all historical narratives. In Tolstoy’s view, history,
like battle, is essentially the product of contingency, has no direction, and
fits no pattern. The causes of historical events are infinitely varied and
forever unknowable, and so historical writing, which claims to explain the
past, necessarily falsifies it. The shape of historical narratives reflects not
the actual course of events but the essentially literary criteria established
by earlier historical narratives.
According
to Tolstoy’s essays, historians also make a number of other closely connected
errors. They presume that history is shaped by the plans and ideas of great
men—whether generals or political leaders or intellectuals like themselves—and
that its direction is determined at dramatic moments leading to major
decisions. In fact, however, history is made by the sum total of an infinite
number of small decisions taken by ordinary people, whose actions are too
unremarkable to be documented. As Tolstoy explains, to presume that grand
events make history is like concluding from a view of a distant region where
only treetops are visible that the region contains nothing but trees. Therefore
Tolstoy’s novel gives its readers countless examples of small incidents that
each exert a tiny influence—which is one reason that War and Peace is so long.
Tolstoy’s belief in the efficacy of the ordinary and the futility of
system-building set him in opposition to the thinkers of his day. It remains
one of the most-controversial aspects of his philosophy.
Anna
Karenina
In Anna
Karenina (1875–77) Tolstoy applied these ideas to family life. The novel’s
first sentence, which indicates its concern with the domestic, is perhaps
Tolstoy’s most famous: “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina interweaves the stories of
three families, the Oblonskys, the Karenins, and the Levins.
The novel
begins at the Oblonskys, where the long-suffering wife Dolly has discovered the
infidelity of her genial and sybaritic husband Stiva. In her kindness, care for
her family, and concern for everyday life, Dolly stands as the novel’s moral
compass. By contrast, Stiva, though never wishing ill, wastes resources,
neglects his family, and regards pleasure as the purpose of life. The figure of
Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that evil, no less than good, ultimately
derives from the small moral choices human beings make moment by moment.
Stiva’s
sister Anna begins the novel as the faithful wife of the stiff, unromantic, but
otherwise decent government minister Aleksey Karenin and the mother of a young
boy, Seryozha. But Anna, who imagines herself the heroine of a romantic novel,
allows herself to fall in love with an officer, Aleksey Vronsky. Schooling
herself to see only the worst in her husband, she eventually leaves him and her
son to live with Vronsky. Throughout the novel, Tolstoy indicates that the
romantic idea of love, which most people identify with love itself, is entirely
incompatible with the superior kind of love, the intimate love of good
families. As the novel progresses, Anna, who suffers pangs of conscience for
abandoning her husband and child, develops a habit of lying to herself until
she reaches a state of near madness and total separation from reality. She at
last commits suicide by throwing herself under a train. The realization that
she may have been thinking about life incorrectly comes to her only when she is
lying on the track, and it is too late to save herself.
The third
story concerns Dolly’s sister Kitty, who first imagines she loves Vronsky but
then recognizes that real love is the intimate feeling she has for her family’s
old friend, Konstantin Levin. Their story focuses on courtship, marriage, and
the ordinary incidents of family life, which, in spite of many difficulties,
shape real happiness and a meaningful existence. Throughout the novel, Levin is
tormented by philosophical questions about the meaning of life in the face of
death. Although these questions are never answered, they vanish when Levin
begins to live correctly by devoting himself to his family and to daily work.
Like his creator Tolstoy, Levin regards the systems of intellectuals as
spurious and as incapable of embracing life’s complexity.
Both War
and Peace and Anna Karenina advance the idea that ethics can never be a matter
of timeless rules applied to particular situations. Rather, ethics depends on a
sensitivity, developed over a lifetime, to particular people and specific
situations. Tolstoy’s preference for particularities over abstractions is often
described as the hallmark of his thought.
Conversion
and religious beliefs
Upon
completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy fell into a profound state of existential
despair, which he describes in his Ispoved (1884; My Confession). All activity
seemed utterly pointless in the face of death, and Tolstoy, impressed by the
faith of the common people, turned to religion. Drawn at first to the Russian
Orthodox church into which he had been born, he rapidly decided that it, and
all other Christian churches, were corrupt institutions that had thoroughly
falsified true Christianity. Having discovered what he believed to be Christ’s
message and having overcome his paralyzing fear of death, Tolstoy devoted the
rest of his life to developing and propagating his new faith. He was
excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901.
In the
early 1880s he wrote three closely related works, Issledovaniye dogmaticheskogo
bogosloviya (written 1880; An Examination of Dogmatic Theology), Soyedineniye i
perevod chetyrokh yevangeliy (written 1881; Union and Translation of the Four
Gospels), and V chyom moya vera? (written 1884; What I Believe); he later added
Tsarstvo bozhiye vnutri vas (1893; The Kingdom of God Is Within You) and many
other essays and tracts. In brief, Tolstoy rejected all the sacraments, all
miracles, the Holy Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and many other tenets
of traditional religion, all of which he regarded as obfuscations of the true
Christian message contained, especially, in the Sermon on the Mount. He
rejected the Old Testament and much of the New, which is why, having studied
Greek, he composed his own “corrected” version of the Gospels. For Tolstoy,
“the man Jesus,” as he called him, was not the son of God but only a wise man
who had arrived at a true account of life. Tolstoy’s rejection of religious
ritual contrasts markedly with his attitude in Anna Karenina, where religion is
viewed as a matter not of dogma but of traditional forms of daily life.
Stated
positively, the Christianity of Tolstoy’s last decades stressed five tenets: be
not angry, do not lust, do not take oaths, do not resist evil, and love your
enemies. Nonresistance to evil, the doctrine that inspired Gandhi, meant not
that evil must be accepted but only that it cannot be fought with evil means,
especially violence. Thus, Tolstoy became a pacifist. Because governments rely
on the threat of violence to enforce their laws, Tolstoy also became a kind of
anarchist. He enjoined his followers not only to refuse military service but
also to abstain from voting or from having recourse to the courts. He therefore
had to go through considerable inner conflict when it came time to make his
will or to use royalties secured by copyright even for good works. In general,
it may be said that Tolstoy was well aware that he did not succeed in living
according to his teachings.
Tolstoy
based the prescription against oaths (including promises) on an idea adapted
from his early work: the impossibility of knowing the future and therefore the
danger of binding oneself in advance. The commandment against lust eventually
led him to propose (in his afterword to Kreytserova sonata [1891; The Kreutzer
Sonata], a dark novella about a man who murders his wife) total abstinence as
an ideal. His wife, already concerned about their strained relations, objected.
In defending his most-extreme ideas, Tolstoy compared Christianity to a lamp
that is not stationary but is carried along by human beings; it lights up ever
new moral realms and reveals ever higher ideals as mankind progresses
spiritually.
Fiction
after 1880 of Leo Tolstoy
Leo
TolstoyLeo Tolstoy, 1900.
Tolstoy’s
fiction after Anna Karenina may be divided into two groups. He wrote a number
of moral tales for common people, including “Gde lyubov, tam i bog” (written
1885; “Where Love Is, God Is”), “Chem lyudi zhivy” (written 1882; “What People Live
By”), and “Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno” (written 1885; “How Much Land Does
a Man Need”), a story that the Irish novelist James Joyce rather extravagantly
praised as “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” For
educated people, Tolstoy wrote fiction that was both realistic and highly
didactic. Some of these works succeed brilliantly, especially Smert Ivana
Ilicha (written 1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyich), a novella describing a man’s
gradual realization that he is dying and that his life has been wasted on
trivialities. Otets Sergy (written 1898; Father Sergius), which may be taken as
Tolstoy’s self-critique, tells the story of a proud man who wants to become a
saint but discovers that sainthood cannot be consciously sought. Regarded as a
great holy man, Sergius comes to realize that his reputation is groundless;
warned by a dream, he escapes incognito to seek out a simple and decent woman
whom he had known as a child. At last he learns that not he but she is the
saint, that sainthood cannot be achieved by imitating a model, and that true
saints are ordinary people unaware of their own prosaic goodness. This story
therefore seems to criticize the ideas Tolstoy espoused after his conversion
from the perspective of his earlier great novels.
In 1899
Tolstoy published his third long novel, Voskreseniye (Resurrection); he used
the royalties to pay for the transportation of a persecuted religious sect, the
Dukhobors, to Canada. The novel’s hero, the idle aristocrat Dmitry Nekhlyudov,
finds himself on a jury where he recognizes the defendant, the prostitute
Katyusha Maslova, as a woman whom he once had seduced, thus precipitating her
life of crime. After she is condemned to imprisonment in Siberia, he decides to
follow her and, if she will agree, to marry her. In the novel’s most-remarkable
exchange, she reproaches him for his hypocrisy: once you got your pleasure from
me, and now you want to get your salvation from me, she tells him. She refuses
to marry him, but, as the novel ends, Nekhlyudov achieves spiritual awakening
when he at last understands Tolstoyan truths, especially the futility of
judging others. The novel’s most-celebrated sections satirize the church and
the justice system, but the work is generally regarded as markedly inferior to
War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy’s
conversion led him to write a treatise and several essays on art. Sometimes he
expressed in more-extreme form ideas he had always held (such as his dislike
for imitation of fashionable schools), but at other times he endorsed ideas
that were incompatible with his own earlier novels, which he rejected. In Chto
takoye iskusstvo? (1898; What Is Art?) he argued that true art requires a
sensitive appreciation of a particular experience, a highly specific feeling
that is communicated to the reader not by propositions but by “infection.” In
Tolstoy’s view, most celebrated works of high art derive from no real
experience but rather from clever imitation of existing art. They are therefore
“counterfeit” works that are not really art at all. Tolstoy further divides
true art into good and bad, depending on the moral sensibility with which a
given work infects its audience. Condemning most acknowledged masterpieces,
including William Shakespeare’s plays as well as his own great novels, as
either counterfeit or bad, Tolstoy singled out for praise the biblical story of
Joseph and, among Russian works, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead
(1861–62) and some stories by his young friend Anton Chekhov. He was cool to
Chekhov’s drama, however, and, in a celebrated witticism, once told Chekhov
that his plays were even worse than Shakespeare’s.
Tolstoy’s
late works also include a satiric drama, Zhivoy trup (written 1900; The Living
Corpse), and a harrowing play about peasant life, Vlast tmy (written 1886; The
Power of Darkness). After his death, a number of unpublished works came to
light, most notably the novella Khadji-Murat (1904; Hadji-Murad), a brilliant
narrative about the Caucasus reminiscent of Tolstoy’s earliest fiction.
Last
years
Leo
Tolstoy with his grandchildren
Leo
Tolstoy with his grandchildrenLeo Tolstoy with his grandchildren, c. 1900.
With the
notable exception of his daughter Aleksandra, whom he made his heir, Tolstoy’s
family remained aloof from or hostile to his teachings. His wife especially resented
the constant presence of disciples, led by the dogmatic V.G. Chertkov, at
Yasnaya Polyana. Their once happy life had turned into one of the most famous
bad marriages in literary history. The story of his dogmatism and her penchant
for scenes has excited numerous biographers to take one side or the other.
Because both kept diaries, and indeed exchanged and commented on each other’s
diaries, their quarrels are almost too well documented.
Tormented
by his domestic situation and by the contradiction between his life and his
principles, in 1910 Tolstoy at last escaped incognito from Yasnaya Polyana,
accompanied by Aleksandra and his doctor. In spite of his stealth and desire
for privacy, the international press was soon able to report on his movements. Within
a few days, he contracted pneumonia and died of heart failure at the railroad
station of Astapovo.
Legacy
of Leo Tolstoy
In
contrast to other psychological writers, such as Dostoyevsky, who specialized
in unconscious processes, Tolstoy described conscious mental life with
unparalleled mastery. His name has become synonymous with an appreciation of
contingency and of the value of everyday activity. Oscillating between
skepticism and dogmatism, Tolstoy explored the most-diverse approaches to human
experience. Above all, his greatest works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina,
endure as the summit of realist fiction.
Gary Saul
Morson
The
Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
With
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