Leo Tolstoy
Count
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (,
Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj), commonly referred to in
English as
Leo Tolstoy, (
September 9,
1828 –
November 20,
1910,
N.S.;
August 28,
1828 –
November 7,
1910,
O.S.) was a
Russian
novelist,
philosopher,
Christian anarchist,
pacifist,
educational reformer,
vegetarian, moral thinker and an influential member of the
Tolstoy family.Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces
War and Peace and
Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of
realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on
nonviolent resistance through his work
The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as
Mahatma Gandhi and
Martin Luther King, Jr..
Tolstoy was born in
Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate situated in the region of
Tula,
Russia and was the fourth of five children. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by relatives. In 1844, Tolstoy began studying law and
Oriental languages at
Kazan University, where teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." He eventually left the university in the middle of his studies, returned to Yasnaya Polyana, and spent much of his time in
Moscow and
St. Petersburg. In 1851, after contracting heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy accompanied his elder brother to the
Caucasus and joined the
Russian Army. Tolstoy began writing literature around this time.
His conversion from a dissolute and privileged society author to the non-violent and spiritual anarchist of his latter days was brought about by two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860-61, a period when many liberal-leaning Russian aristocrats escaped the stifling political repression in Russia; others who followed the same path were
Alexander Herzen,
Mikhail Bakunin and
Peter Kropotkin. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that would mark the rest of his life. Writing in a letter to his friend V. P. Botkin:
The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.
His European trip in 1860-61 shaped both his political and literary transformation when he met
Victor Hugo, whose literary talents Tolstoy praised after reading Hugo's newly finished
Les Miserables. A comparison of Hugo's novel and Tolstoy's
War and Peace shows the influence of the evocation of its battle scenes. Tolstoy's political philosophy was also influenced by a March 1861 visit to French anarchist
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels. Apart from reviewing Proudhon's forthcoming publication, "La Guerre et la Paix", whose title Tolstoy would borrow for his masterpiece, the two men discussed education, as Tolstoy wrote in his educational notebooks:
If I recount this conversation with Proudhon, it is to show that, in my personal experience, he was the only man who understood the significance of education and of the printing press in our time.
|
Tolstoy's wife Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya and daughter Alexandra Tolstaya. |
Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded thirteen schools for his serfs' children, whose ground-breaking libertarian principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay, "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police, but as a direct forerunner to A.S.Neill's
Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of libertarian education.
On 23rd September 1862 Tolstoy married Sofia Andreevna Bers (1844-1919), who was 16 years younger, and together they had thirteen children, five of whom died during in their childhoods.
[Feuer,Kathryn B. Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace,Cornell University Press, 1996, ISBN 0801419026] The marriage with Sofia Bers was marked from the outset by Tolstoy when, on the eve of their marriage, he gave her his diaries detailing Tolstoy's sexual relations with his serfs. Even so, their early marriage life was comparatively blissful and idyllic and allowed Tolstoy much freedom to compose the literary masterpieces
War and Peace and
Anna Karenina. His late marriage life has been described by
A.N.Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history. His relationship with his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical, and he sought to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the renunciation of copyright on his earlier works.
Tolstoy was one of the giants of 19th century
Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels
War and Peace and
Anna Karenina, and many shorter works, including the
novellas
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and
Hadji Murad.His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes:
Dostoevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists while
Gustave Flaubert gushed: "What an artist and what a psychologist!".
Anton Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate, wrote: "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature." Later critics and novelists continue to bear testaments to his art:
Virginia Woolf went on to declare him "greatest of all novelists", and James Joyce noted: "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!".
Thomas Mann wrote of his seemingly guileless artistry""Seldom did art work so much like nature""sentiments shared in part by many others, including
Marcel Proust,
William Faulkner,
Vladimir Nabokov (who superlatively praised works such as
Anna Karenina and
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, questioned the reputation of
War and Peace and harshly critized
Resurrection and
The Kreutzer Sonata).
His
autobiographical novels,
Childhood,
Boyhood, and
Youth (1852–1856), his first publications, tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the differences between him and his
peasants. Although in later life Tolstoy rejected these books as sentimental, a great deal of his own life is revealed, and the books still have relevance for their telling of the universal story of growing up.
Tolstoy served as a
second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the
Crimean War, recounted in his
Sevastapol Sketches. His experiences in battle helped develop his
pacifism, and gave him material for realistic depiction of the horrors of
war in his later work.
His
fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived.
The Cossacks (1863) describes the
Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl.
Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the
peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.
Tolstoy not only drew from his experience of life but created characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in
War and Peace, Levin in
Anna Karenina and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in
Resurrection.
War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest
novels ever written, remarkable for its breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of
Napoleon, from the court of
Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of
Austerlitz and
Borodino. Tolstoy's original idea for War and Peace was to investigate the causes of the
Decembrist revolt, to which it refers only in the last chapters, from which can be deduced that Andrei Bolkonski's son will become one of the Decembrists. The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider
War and Peace to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the
realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life.
War and Peace (which is to Tolstoy really an
epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that
Anna Karenina was his first true novel, and it is indeed one of the greatest of all realist novels.
After
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy concentrated on
Christian themes, and his later novels such as
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and
What Then Must We Do? develop a radical
anarcho-
pacifist Christian
philosophy which led to his
excommunication from the
Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.
For all the due praise of Tolstoy's two great pillars of Russian Civilization, "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace," Tolstoy rejected the two works later in his life as something not as true of reality. Such an argument is supported in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" whose main character continually battles with his family and servants, requiring above the water and food needed to keep him alive, Ivan demands honesty.
After reading
Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Representation, Tolstoy gradually became converted to the ascetic morality that was praised in that book.
In Chapter VI of
A Confession, Tolstoy quoted the final paragraph of Schopenhauer's work. In this paragraph, the German philosopher explained how the nothingness that results from complete denial of self is only a relative nothingness and not to be feared. Tolstoy was struck by the description of
Christian,
Buddhist, and
Hindu ascetic renunciation as being the path to holiness. After reading passages such as the following, which abound in Schopenhauer's ethical chapters, Tolstoy, the Russian nobleman, chose poverty and denial of the will.
Tolstoy's Christian beliefs were based on the
Sermon on the Mount, and particularly on the phrase about
turn the other cheek, which he saw as a justification for pacifism,
nonviolence and
nonresistance. Tolstoy believed being a Christian made him a pacifist and, due to the military force used by his government, being a pacifist made him an anarchist. He felt very isolated in these beliefs, suffering on occasion with
depression so severe that whenever he saw a rope he thought of
hanging himself, and he hid his guns and stopped hunting to stop himself from committing
suicide. He talks about his struggle with suicide Chapters 4-7 of his book
A Confession.
Tolstoy believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner self-perfection through following the
Great Commandment of loving one's neighbor and God rather than looking outward to the Church or state for guidance and meaning. His belief in
nonresistance (
nonviolence) when faced by conflict is another distinct attribute of his philosophy based on
Christ's teachings. By directly influencing
Mahatma Gandhi with this idea through his work
The Kingdom of God is Within You (full text of English translation
available on Wikisource), Tolstoy has had a huge influence on the nonviolent resistance movement to this day. He believed that the aristocracy were a burden on the poor, and that the only solution to how we live together is through
anarchism. He also opposed private property and the institution of marriage and valued the ideals of
chastity and
sexual abstinence (discussed in
Father Sergius and his preface to
The Kreutzer Sonata), ideals also held by the young Gandhi. Tolstoy's later work is often criticised as being overly didactic and patchily written, but derives a passion and verve from the depth of his austere moral views. The sequence of the temptation of Sergius in
Father Sergius, for example, is among his later triumphs.
Gorky relates how Tolstoy once read this passage before himself and
Chekhov and that Tolstoy was moved to tears by the end of the reading. Other later passages of rare power include the crises of self faced by the protagonists of
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and
Master and Man, where the main character (in
Ilyich) or the reader (in
Master and Man) is made aware of the foolishness of the protagonists' lives.
Tolstoy had a profound influence on the development of
anarchist thought. In fact, the
Tolstoyans were formed by Vladimir Chertkov (1854 - 1936), Tolstoy's closest friend and confidant, in order to spread Tolstoy's religious teachings. And, Prince
Peter Kropotkin wrote of Tolstoy in the article on
anarchism in the
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica:
Without naming himself an anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, like his predecessors in the popular religious movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Chojecki, Denk and many others, took the anarchist position as regards the state and property rights, deducing his conclusions from the general spirit of the teachings of Jesus and from the necessary dictates of reason. With all the might of his talent he made (especially in The Kingdom of God is Within You) a powerful criticism of the church, the state and law altogether, and especially of the present property laws. He describes the state as the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force. Robbers, he says, are far less dangerous than a well-organized government. He makes a searching criticism of the prejudices which are current now concerning the benefits conferred upon men by the church, the state and the existing distribution of property, and from the teachings of Jesus he deduces the rule of non-resistance and the absolute condemnation of all wars. His religious arguments are, however, so well combined with arguments borrowed from a dispassionate observation of the present evils, that the anarchist portions of his works appeal to the religious and the non-religious reader alike.
In hundreds of essays over the last twenty years of his life, Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of the State and recommended books by Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, whilst rejecting anarchism's espousal of violent revolutionary means, writing in the 1900 essay, "On Anarchy":
The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power ... There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
Despite his misgivings about anarchist violence, Tolstoy took risks to circulate the prohibited publications of anarchist thinkers in Russia, and corrected the proofs of Kropotkin's "Words of a Rebel", illegally published in St Petersburg in 1906.
A letter Tolstoy wrote in 1908 to an
Indian newspaper entitled "
Letter to a Hindu" resulted in intense correspondence with
Mohandas Gandhi, who was in
South Africa at the time and was beginning to become an activist. Reading "The Kingdom of God is Within You" had convinced Gandhi to abandon violence and espouse
nonviolent resistance, a debt Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi would only last a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to give the name the Tolstoy Colony to his second ashram in South Africa. Besides non-violent resistance, the two men shared a common belief in the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy's essays. Along with his growing idealism, Tolstoy also became a major supporter of the
Esperanto movement. Tolstoy was impressed by the pacifist beliefs of the
Doukhobors and brought their persecution to the attention of the international community, after they burned their weapons in peaceful protest in 1895. He aided the Doukhobors in migrating to
Canada.
In 1904, during the
Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy condemned the war and wrote to the
Japanese Buddhist priest
Soyen Shaku in a failed attempt to make a joint pacifist statement.
Tolstoy was an extremely wealthy member of the
Russian nobility. He came to believe that he was undeserving of his inherited wealth, and was renowned among the peasantry for his generosity. He would frequently return to his country estate with vagrants whom he felt needed a helping hand, and would often dispense large sums of money to street beggars while on trips to the city, much to his wife's chagrin.
He died of
pneumonia at
Astapovo station in
1910 after leaving home in the middle of winter at the age of 82. His death came only days after gathering the nerve to abandon his family and wealth and take up the path of a wandering ascetic—a path that he had agonized over pursuing for decades. Unfortunately for Tolstoy, he wasn't in his peak life and had a declining health at the time he had pneumonia. Thousands of peasants lined the streets at his funeral.
Tolstoy harbored particular views of other religious traditions as well, which shed some light on his worldview. Tolstoy refered to the
Jews as "that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religious. The Jew is the pioneer of liberty. The Jew is the pioneer of civilization. The Jew is the emblem of eternity."
Childhood (
"етство [
Detstvo]; 1852)
The Raid (1852)
Boyhood (
Отрочество [
Otrochestvo]; 1854)
Youth (
Юность [
Yunost']; 1856)
Sevastopol Stories (
Севастопольские рассказы [
Sevastopolskie Rasskazy]; 1855–
56)
Family Happiness (1859)
The Cossacks (
Казаки [
Kazaki]; 1863)
Ivan the Fool: A Lost Opportunity
(1863)
*Polikushka (1863)
*War and Peace ('ойна и мир
[Voyna i mir
]; 1865–69)
*A Prisoner in the Caucasus (Кавказский Пленник
[Kavkazskii Plennik
]; 1872)
*Father Sergius (Отец Сергий
[Otets Sergii
]; 1873)
*Anna Karenina (Анна Каренина
[Anna Karenina
]; 1875–77)
*A Confession (1882)
*Strider: The Story of a Horse (1864, 1886)
*What I Believe (also called
My Religion) (1884)
complete textThe Death of Ivan Ilyich (
Смерть Ивана Ильича [
Smert' Ivana Il'icha]; 1886)
How Much Land Does a Man Need? (
Много ли человеку земли нужно [
Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno]; 1886)
The Power of Darkness ('ласть тьмы [Vlast' t'my]; 1886), drama
The Fruits of Culture (play) (1889)
The Kreutzer Sonata and other stories (
Крейцерова соната [
Kreitserova Sonata]; 1889)
The Kingdom of God is Within You (
available at wikisource) (1894)
Master and Man and other stories (1895)
The Gospel in Brief (1896)
*What Is Art? (1897)
*Letter to the Liberals (1898)
*Resurrection ('оскресение
[Voskresenie
]; 1899)
*The Living Corpse (Живой труп
[Zhivoi trup
]; published 1911), drama
*Hadji Murat (Хаджи-Мурат
[Khadzhi-Murat'']; written in
1896-1904, published 1912)
*While Tolstoy and
Fyodor Dostoevsky"the other giant of 19th century Russian literature"both praised each other and were equally influenced by each other's works, they never met in person. Tolstoy reportedly burst into tears when he learned of Dostoevsky's death. At the time, both were considered by both critics and the public to be Russia's greatest novelists.
*Tolstoy escaped arrest by the Tsarist secret police during a raid on his house in 1862 when Maria Tolstoy concealed a sheaf of letters from the banned thinker Alexander Herzen by sitting down on them and refusing to move until the police left. A novelized account of Tsarist harassment of Tolstoy's schools is given by Bulat Okudzhava in "The Extraordinary Adventures of Secret Agent Shipov in Pursuit of Count Leo Tolstoy, in the Year 1862", Abelard-Schuman, London 1973.
*Knowing of his vegetarian convictions, Tolstoy's aunt wrote to him before visiting Yasnaya Polyana to insist that meat be served during her stay. When she came down for her first dinner, she found a meat-cleaver on the table and a live chicken tied to her chair.
*Many of Tolstoy's supporters fled to Britain to escape persecution and founded utopian colonies from 1900-1910, playing a considerable role in the later creation of the Peace Pledge Union.
*Many of Tolstoy's political essays from this period were prohibited in Russia and were only published in the UK by his exiled supporters, notably his former secretary Vladimir Tchertkoff, who was the "cut-out" for contacts between Kropotkin and Tolstoy. The original publications are in the British Library; a useful compilation of these otherwise unpublished political essays is "Government is Violence - essays on anarchism and pacifism", Leo Tolstoy, Phoenix Press, London 1990, ISBN 0-948984-15-5. Other compilations of essays, both political and non-political, were published in the 1920s and 1930s by the Oxford University Press; these blue cloth-backed pocketbooks can be found in the "Essays" or "Pocketbooks" sections of British second-hand bookshops. The most interesting essays from a libertarian perspective are the long essays "The End of the Age", "The Slavery of Our Times" and "The Kingdom of God is Within You" and the shorter "Patriotism and Government" and "Thou Shalt not Kill".
*Tolstoy's grand-niece
Pati Behrs was married to
John Derek 1951-57.
*Tolstoy is the great-great-grandfather of
Swedish jazz-singer
Viktoria Tolstoy.
*Tolstoy means
fat in Russian. Lev means
lion in Russian.
*In Episode 14, Season 5 of Seinfeld titled "The Marine Biologist," Jerry falsely informs Elaine that Tolstoy originally intended for his book "War and Peace" to be entitled "War, What is it Good For?" but that his mistress disagreed with the former title.
*
Tolstoy syndromeUniversal and museum websites on Leo Tolstoy*
Leo Tolstoy - A comprehensive site with pictures,
e-texts, biography, genealogy, etc.
*
Leo Tolstoy museum in Yasnaya Polyana*
State Leo Tolstoy Museum in MoscowLeo Tolstoy's biography and critique*
Illustrated Biography online at University of Virginia
*
Brief bio*
Leo Tolstoy's Life - Tolstoy's personal, professional and world event timeline, and
synopsis of his life from
Masterpiece Theatre.
*
The Last Days of Leo Tolstoy*
Aleksandra Tolstaya, "Tragedy of Tolstoy"*
The World of Leo Tolstoy*
Information and Critique on Leo Tolstoy*
Tolstoy's Legacy for Mankind: A Manifesto for Nonviolence, Part 1 *
Tolstoy's Legacy for Mankind: A Manifesto for Nonviolence, Part 2 E-texts of works by Leo Tolstoy*
Free ebook of Leo Tolstoy at
Project Gutenberg*
Works by Leo Tolstoy at University of Virginia
*
Leo Tolstoy at Great Books Online
*
A lot of works by Leo Tolstoy in the original Russian*
Links to works online*
Tolstoy at CCEL
*
What I Believe - complete text available for download
The Spiritual Leo Tolstoy*
The Spiritual and Philosophical Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy in the media*
ALEXANDER II AND HIS TIMES: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky
