Leo Tolstoy was a man of many parts--soldier, sensualist,
country nobleman, writer, teacher and social critic, and, not
least, benevolent patriarch. Photographs taken of him in his
later years show a fearsome-looking man with long hair and a
flowing beard, dressed in peasant\'s clothes, surrounded by his
wife and children. In writing his panoramic novels of Russian
life, Tolstoy drew heavily on his varied experiences. Indeed,
he gave to some of his central characters, as in Anna Karenina,
his own thoughts and feelings, which were sometimes, as you\'ll
see, contradictory.
Leo (or Lev) Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy was born near Moscow
on August 28 (September 9, New Style), 1828, into an old
aristocratic family that for generations had been in the Czar\'s
inner circle. Orphaned at nine, he was raised and educated by
an aunt. In 1844 he entered the University of Kazan where he
was greatly influenced by the writings of the 18th-century
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who espoused the
virtues of nature and a simple life. He left the university in
1847 without obtaining a degree.
Tolstoy then spent time carousing and hunting. Because he
was awkward and not as handsome as some of the other young
nobles in his social circle, he was nicknamed \"Lyvochka the
bear.\" We know from his diaries that Tolstoy was divided against
himself: Although he devoted himself fully to having a wild
time, he felt guilty about it. But he couldn\'t determine the
source of his guilty feelings. Although he believed in God, he
had no patience for organized religion and the rules it imposed
on life (he was later excommunicated for his views by the
Russian Orthodox Church).
Fed up with city life, Tolstoy went back to Yasnaya Polyana
(Clear Glade), his family\'s ancestral estate near Moscow. His
plan was to become a farmer and devote himself to improving the
lot of peasants. He developed a system whereby he would sell
peasants small pieces of land year by year, so that they, too,
would be property owners and have a personal stake in the
productivity of Yasnaya Polyana. Although the peasants liked
him personally, they couldn\'t understand why a nobleman would
try to help them, and so they distrusted his efforts. Terribly
disappointed, Tolstoy went to Moscow, where he spent two more
years (1848-1850) living the high life. His diaries show a
restless, searching young man who gambled and played with women
by night, and then chastised himself by day. He began to write
during this time and in 1852 published Childhood, a reminiscence
that received good reviews. He later wrote Boyhood (1854) and
Youth (1856).
Perhaps in another burst of restlessness, Tolstoy in 1851
followed one of his brothers, Nicholas, by volunteering for the
army; he served in the Caucasus fighting Tatar guerrillas. He
continued to write and in 1854-1856 published Sevastopol
Sketches. These accounts of the Crimean War (in which Russia
fought Turkey, England, France, and Sardinia) catapulted Tolstoy
to the front rank of contemporary Russian writers.
He left the army in 1855 and went to Saint Petersburg, the
Russian capital, where the literary community welcomed him. But
Tolstoy had no patience for the intellectuals he found there or
for their urbane, middle-class views. He had one dispute after
another, the most famous of which was with Ivan Turgenev, then
the recognized master of the Russian literary scene. Tolstoy
disagreed with his fellow writers basically because as a
Slavophile--an admirer of Slavic, and especially Russian
culture--he didn\'t share their enchantment with Western European
notions of progress.
Tolstoy then traveled extensively in Europe, visiting France,
Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and England. (He spoke French,
German, and English.) A major reason for his travels was to
study European systems of education, about which he had
developed a keen interest. His exposure to European ways,
however, made him feel all the more strongly that Russia was a
case apart and could not look to the West to help it realize its
destiny.
In 1859, Tolstoy started a school at Yasnaya Polyana for the
children of his peasants. Convinced that refined,
European-style education killed youthful exuberance, he did
everything possible to nurture his pupils\' spontaneity and
curiosity.
In 1860, Tolstoy\'s brother Nicholas died of tuberculosis.
Tolstoy was deeply affected by his death and later re-created it
in Anna Karenina, when he described the death of Levin\'s
brother, also named Nicholas. Like Levin--the novel\'s hero,
whose life he patterned on his own--Tolstoy immersed himself in
the affairs of his estate as a way of alleviating his emotional
pain.
In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya) Andreyevna Behrs, the
daughter of a prominent Moscow physician. Then began the most
productive period of his life. He wrote War and Peace,
considered one of the world\'s great novels, from 1864 to 1869.
He completed Anna Karenina, another masterpiece, in 1876, while
producing a series of short stories, as well as essays on
religion, art, and social subjects.
In his books Tolstoy, like most writers, used material from
his personal experiences as well as from the world around him.
This is very evident in Anna Karenina. He had wanted for some
time to write \"a novel of contemporary life,\" as he put it.
Marriage, an enduring theme in his work, would be a central
concern. So, too, would adultery. Tolstoy had recently had an
affair with one of his peasants and had abandoned the child of
this union. He felt extremely guilty, and you can sense this
clearly in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy got the idea for the novel\'s
ending and its heroine\'s first name from the suicide in 1872 of
Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, the betrayed common-law wife of one of
Tolstoy\'s neighbors, who threw herself under a train. Tolstoy
had known Anna Stepanovna and went to the autopsy following her
death. You\'ll note his passion for close observation in the
startlingly exact description of Anna Karenina\'s suicide.
Tolstoy was not only an artist of high standards but also a
man continually struggling with spiritual matters. This, too,
comes across in Anna Karenina. Levin\'s struggles and visionary
projects in the novel are similar to Tolstoy\'s. Levin\'s
marriage to Kitty and his happiness in their domestic life
reflect Tolstoy\'s marriage to Sonya and their happy first years
together. He based the character of Kitty on Sonya.
Anna Karenina is a towering achievement because Tolstoy
succeeded not only in presenting a panoramic picture of his era,
but because he dealt with aspects of human nature that are
timeless. You can find people throughout history with problems
similar to Anna\'s desperation and guilt, Karenin\'s fear of
intimacy, Vronsky\'s struggle to keep himself from being
smothered by Anna\'s possessiveness. Most readers consider
Tolstoy one of the great masters at drawing psychological
portraits of people. The insights about human nature you will
gain by reading Anna Karenina will probably help you understand
the people around you.
Tolstoy\'s later books reflect a man becoming increasingly
conservative and religious. In The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), a
novel, Tolstoy describes marriage as a wasteland, and sexual
relations--even between husband and wife--as essentially evil.
In another novel, Resurrection (1899-1900), he violently attacks
civilization and argues strongly in favor of an ascetic way of
life. A Confession (1882) is a detailed account of Tolstoy\'s
torturous coming to terms with religion.
We know from his diaries and from his children\'s
reminiscences that as an old man Tolstoy wanted to leave his
family to go off and die alone in the mountains, as religious
ascetics before him had done. But the death of his youngest son
in 1895 so affected his wife Sonya that he dared not leave her.
In his last years, Tolstoy\'s memory faltered seriously and he
suffered fainting spells, after which he would frequently ask
for relatives who had died decades before. On November 20,
1910, a month after one of these attacks, he died at the train
station in the small town of Astapovo, after having finally
decided to flee from Yasnaya Polyana.
All his life Tolstoy had been a combatant, a swimmer against
the tide. He was at odds with his social class on matters of
lifestyle, on priorities in education, on the emancipation of
the serfs (which he strongly favored), and in his belief that
Russia must avoid industrialization and Western models of
progress. He was progressive as an educator, in many ways ahead
of his time as a writer, and visionary as a political thinker.
Yet he opposed women\'s rights and became a religious ascetic,
patterning himself after such thinkers as Lao-tzu, the ancient
Chinese philosopher.
It has been said that Tolstoy\'s novels have more sweep than
those of any other author in the history of literature. Leo
Tolstoy, it could be said, was many men and inhabited many
worlds in his lifetime. He acknowledged that he never totally
resolved the contradictions between his ideals and the way in
which he lived. But he forged those struggles into a singular
body of literary work. His novels are masterpieces that readers
continue to find exciting and relevant.
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