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b. Aug.
28, 1828 (Sept. 9, New Style); d. Nov. 7, 1910 (Nov. 20, New Style) Russian author, one of the
greatest of all novelists. Tolstoy's major works include War and Peace (1863-69),
characterized by Henry James as a "loose baggy monster", and Anna
Karenina (1875-77), which stands alongside Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Fontane's
Effi Briest
as perhaps the most prominent 19th-century European novel of adultery. Tolstoi once said, "The one thing that is necessary,
in life as in art, is to tell the truth." Tolstoy's life is often seen
to form two distinct parts: first comes the author
of great novels, and later a prophet and moral reformer. "In historical events great men - so-called - are
but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the
least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that
seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not
free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and
predestined from all eternity."
(from War and Peace) Leo Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula Province,
the fourth of five children. The title of Count had been conferred on his
ancestor in the early 18th century by Peter the Great. His parents died when
he was a child, and he was brought up by relatives. In 1844 Tolstoy started
his studies of law and oriental languages at Kazan University, but he never
took a degree. Dissatisfied with the standard of education, he returned in
the middle of his studies back to Yasnaya Polyana, and then spent much of his time in Moscow and
St. Petersburg. In 1847 Tolstoy was treated for venereal disease. After
contracting heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy accompanied in 1851 his elder
brother Nikolay to the Caucasus, and joined an
artillery regiment. In the 1850s Tolstoy also began his literary career,
publishing the autobiographical trilogy Childhood (1852), Boyhood
(1854), and Youth (1857). One of Tolstoy's earliest
published stories, 'The Raid', was based on a military maneuver against the
Chechen mountain tribesmen, in which Nikolay's unit
took part. The story appeared in censored form in 1852. "Can it be that
there is not room for all men on this beautiful earth under these
immeasurable starry heavens?" Tolstoy asked. "Can it be possible
that in the midst of this entrancing Nature feelings
of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to exterminate their fellows can endure
in the souls of men?" About fifty years later Tolstoy returned to his
experiences in Caucasus in the novella Hadji
Murad (1904), still a highly insightful
introduction to the backgrounds of today's Chechnyan
tragedy. It also was an elegiac reprise of the dominant themes of Tolstoy's
art and life. The famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein gave the book to his
disciple Norman Malcolm, telling him that there was a lot to be got out of
it. During the Crimean War Tolstoy
commanded a battery, witnessing the siege of Sebastopol (1854-55). In 1857 he
visited France, Switzerland, and Germany. After his travels Tolstoy settled
in Yasnaya Polyana, where
he started a school for peasant children. He saw that the secret of changing
the world lay in education. He investigated during further travels to Europe
(1860-61) educational theory and practice, and published magazines and
textbooks on the subject. In 1862 he married Sonya Andreyevna
Behrs (1844-1919); she bore him 13 children. Sonya
also acted as her husband's devoted secretary. Tolstoy's fiction grew originally
out of his diaries, in which he tried to understand his own feelings and
actions so as to control them. He read widely fiction and philosophy. In the
Caucasus he read Plato and Rousseau, Dickens and Sterne; through the 1850s he
also read and admired Goethe, Stendhal, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Tolstoy's major work, War and
Peace, appeared between the years 1865 and 1869. The epic tale depicted
the story of five families against the background of Napoleon's invasion of
Russia. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the
headquarters of Napoléon, from the court of Alexander to the battlefields of Austerlitz
and Borodino. War and Peace reflected Tolstoy's view that all is predestined, but we
cannot live unless we imagine that we have free will. The harshest judgment
is reserved for Napoleon, who thinks he controls events, but is dreadfully
mistaken. Pierre Bezukhov, who wanders on the
battlefield of Borodino, and sees only the confusion, comes closer to the
truth. Great men are for him ordinary human beings who are vain enough to
accept responsibility for the life of society, but unable to recognize their
own impotence in the cosmic flow. "No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in
expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality
of a feeling - the degree of its 'oscillation', the ebb and flow, the minute
movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on his part) - the inner and
outer texture and 'feel' of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less
than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of
individuals, families, communities, entire nations." (Isaiah Berlin in
'The Hedgehog and the Fox', 1953) Tolstoy's other masterpiece, Anna
Karenina (1873-77), told a tragic story of a married woman, who follows
her lover, but finally at a station throws herself in front of an incoming
train. The novel opens with the famous sentence: "Happy families are all
alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy
juxtaposed in the work crises of family life with the quest for the meaning
of life and social justice. "The Oblonsky home
was in turmoil," Tolstoy writes as an introduction to his themes. Anna
Karenina comes to Moscow to reconcile the Oblonskys.
Her love affair with Vronskii is accompanied with
another intertwined plot, Konstantin Levin's courtship and marriage to Kitty Shcherbatskaia, the sister-in-law of Anna. Tolstoy saw that
everywhere the family life of the landed gentry was breaking up, but he did
not accept nihilist theories about marriage. Aleksei
Karenin, a cold and ambitious man, is unable to
save his career or make Anna happy. "For the first time he vividly
conjured up her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes; and the idea that
she might, and even must have a personal life all her own was so frightening
that he hastened to drive it away. This was the chasm into which he dared not
look." First Anna agrees to end the affair, but when Vronskii
is injured in an accident, she resumes the relationship. Anna gives birth to
their child, and Karenin finally agrees to allow
Anna to run away to Italy with Vronskii. However,
she believes that he no longer loves her, and commits suicide. Through Levin,
who seeks the meaning of existence, Tolstoy states that "everything has
now been turned upside down and is only just taking shape." He and Kitty
learn the values of toil and happiness. Anna Karenina has been filmed in Hollywood several times. One of the
most famous versions, starring Greta Garbo, was
born during the period when the film industry was under the censorial
agencies of the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Production Code
Administration. Thus the love affair of Anna and Vronskii
was strongly condemned in the film and all references to the illegitimate
child were removed. "At every opportunity, characters step forward to
either denounce Anna (Greta Garbo) and Vronsky (Fredric March), or to foretell dire results of
the continued affair. The resistance by Karenin
(Basil Rathbone) to his wife's affair has none of the duplicity suggested by
Tolstoy; rather, he is portrayed as refusing a divorce solely because it
would "legalize a sin."
(from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts
and James M. Welsh, 1999) After finishing Anna Karenina
Tolstoy renounced all his earlier works. "I wrote everything into Anna
Karenina," he later confessed, "and nothing was left over." Voskresenia (1899, Resurrection) was Tolstoy's
last major novel. Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich Nekhliudov has abandoned the prostitute Ekaterina Maslova with their child as a young man. The novel begins
when Maslova is called to court on charges of
murdering a client. Nekhliudov is a member of the
jury. He realizes that he also is accused but in the court of his own
conscience. Maslova is wrongly sentenced to four
years' penal service in Siberia. Nekhliudov follows
her convoy to Siberia and manages to obtain commutation of her sentence from
hard labour with common criminals to exile with the "politicals".
The novel affirmed Tolstoy's belief in the primacy of the individual
conscience over the collective morality of the group. According to Tolstoy's wife Sonia,
the idea for The Kreutzer Sonata (1890) was given to Tolstoy by the
actor V.N. Andreev-Burlak during his visit at Yasnaya Polyana in June 1887.
In the spring of 1888 an amateur performance of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata
took place in Tolstoy's home and it made the author return to an idea he had
had in the 1860s. The Kreutzer Sonata is written in the form of a
frame-story and set on a train. The conversations among the passengers
develop into a discussion of the institution of marriage. Pozdnyshev,
the chief character, tells of his youth and his first visits to brothels, and
his subsequent remorse and self-disgust. He decides to get married and after
a brief engagement, he and his wife spend a disastrous honeymoon in Paris.
Back at Russia the marriage develops into mutual hatred. Pozdnyshev
believes that his wife is having an affair with a musician and he tries to
strangle her, and then stabs her to death with a dagger. He accuses society
and women who inflame, with the aid of dressmakers and cosmeticians, men's
animal instincts. - After writing the novel Tolstoy was accused of preaching
immorality. The Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod wrote to the tsar, and
this marked the beginning of the process that led ultimately to Tolstoy's
excommunication. Tolstoy was forced to write in 1890 a postscript in which he
attempted to explain his unorthodox views. In the 1880s Tolstoy wrote such
philosophical works as A Confession and What I Believe, which was
banned in 1884. He started to see himself more as a sage and moral leader
than an artist. In 1884 occurred his first attempt to leave home. He gave up
his estate to his family, and tried to live as a poor, celibate peasant.
Attracted by Tolstoy's writings, Yasnaya Polyana was visited by hundreds of people from all over
the world. In 1901 the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated the author.
Tolstoy became seriously ill and he recuperated in Crimea. Tolstoy's teachings influenced Gandhi in India, and the kibbutz movement in Palestine, and in
Russia his moral authority rivalled that of the
tsar. After leaving his estate with his disciple Vladimir Chertkov
on the urge to live as a wandering ascetic, Tolstoy died of pneumonia on
November 7 (Nov. 20, New Style) in 1910, at a remote railway junction. Eight
years after his death, his wife was heard to remark, "I lived with Lev
Nikolayevich for forty-eight years, but I never really learned what kind of
man he was." Tolstoy's collected works, which were published in the
Soviet Union in 1928-58, consisted of 90 volumes. In his study What is Art?
(1898) Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Dante, but not really
convincingly. He stated that art is a conveyor of feelings, good and bad,
from the artist to others. Through feeling, the artist 'infects' another with
the desire to act well or badly. "Art is a human activity having for its
purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which
men have risen." Tolstoy used ordinary events and characters to examine
war, religion, feminism, and other topics. He was convinced that
philosophical principles could only be understood in their concrete
expression in history. All of his work is characterized by uncomplicated
style, careful construction, and deep insight into human nature. His chapters
are short, and he paid much attention to the details of everyday life.
Tolstoy also refused to recognize the conventional climaxes of narrative -
War and Peace begins in the middle of a conversation and ends in the first
epilogue in the middle of a sentence. Tolstoy's form of Christianity was
based on the Sermon on the Mount and crystallized in five leading ideas:
human beings must suppress their anger, whether warranted or not; no sex
outside marriage; no oaths of any sort; renunciation of all resistance to
evil; love of enemies. "The main feature, or rather the main note which
resounds through every page of Tolstoi, even the
seemingly unimportant ones, is love, compassion for Man in general (and not
only for the humiliated and the offended), pity of some sort for his
weakness, his insignificance, for the shortness of his life, the vanity of
his desires... Yes, Tolstoi is for me the dearest,
the deepest, the greatest of all artists. But this
concerns the Tolstoi of yesterday, who has nothing
in common with the exasperating moralist and theorizer of today." (the composer Peter Tchaikovsky in Vladimir Volkoff's biography Tchaikovsky: A Self-portrait,
1975)
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