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Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й (September 9, 1828 – November 20, 1910) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho - pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the Tula region of Russia. The Tolstoys were a well known family of old Russian nobility. He was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, a veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812,
and Countess Mariya Tolstaya (Volkonskaya). Tolstoy's parents died when
he was young, so he and his siblings were brought up by relatives. In
1844, he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University. His teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." Tolstoy left university in the middle of his studies, returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent much of his time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. It was about this time that he started writing. His
conversion from a dissolute and privileged society author to the
non-violent and spiritual anarchist of his latter days was brought about
by his experience in the army as well as two trips around Europe in
1857 and 1860 – 61. 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 Vasily 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 (War and Peace in
French), 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." Fired
by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded thirteen
schools for his serfs' children, based on the principles Tolstoy
described in his 1862 essay "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". Tolstoy's educational experiments were short lived, partly due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police. However, 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 democratic education.
On September 23, 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs,
who was 16 years his junior and the daughter of a court physician. She
was called Sonya, the Russian diminutive of Sofya, by her family and
friends. They had thirteen children, five of whom died during childhood. The
marriage was marked from the outset by sexual passion and emotional
insensitivity when Tolstoy, on the eve of their marriage, gave her his
diaries detailing his extensive sexual past and the fact that one of the
serfs on his estate had borne him a son. Even so, their early married life was ostensibly happy and allowed Tolstoy much freedom to compose War and Peace and Anna Karenina with Sonya acting as his secretary, proof reader and financial manager. However, their latter life together has been described by A.N. Wilson as
one of the unhappiest in literary history. Tolstoy's relationship with
his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. This
saw him seeking to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the
renunciation of the copyrights on his earlier works. Tolstoy is one of the giants of Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina and novellas such as Hadji Murad and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists. Gustave Flaubert, on reading a translation of War and Peace, exclaimed, "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 testament to Tolstoy's art. Virginia Woolf declared him the greatest of all novelists. James Joyce noted that, "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!". Thomas Mann wrote
of Tolstoy's seemingly guileless artistry: "Seldom did art work so much
like nature". Such sentiments were shared by the likes of Proust, Faulkner and Nabokov. The latter heaped superlatives upon The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina; he questioned, however, the reputation of War and Peace, and sharply criticized Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy's earliest works, the autobiographical novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852 – 1856),
tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the chasm
between himself and his peasants. Though he later rejected them as
sentimental, a great deal of Tolstoy's own life is revealed. They retain
their relevance as accounts 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 stir his subsequent 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 own life
experiences but also 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 dramatic breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes
580 characters, many historical with 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 the novel 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. After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and What Is to Be Done? develop a radical anarcho - pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. For all the praise showered on 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,
demanding honesty above the water and food needed to sustain him. During his life, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that William Shakespeare was
a bad dramatist and not a true artist at all. Tolstoy explained his
views in a critical essay on Shakespeare written in 1903: "I remember
the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to
receive a powerful aesthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the
other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear", "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium...". He goes on: Several
times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I
invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and
bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being
desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of
seventy - five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the
historical plays, the "Henrys," "Troilus and Cressida," the "Tempest,"
"Cymbeline," and I have felt, with even greater force, the same
feelings, — this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm,
indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius
which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to
imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent
merits, — thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding, — is
a great evil, as is every untruth. Understanding that his conclusions contradict popular opinion, Tolstoy supported his opinion by detailed analysis of King Lear. George Orwell wrote a well known response to this: Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool. After reading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation,
Tolstoy gradually became converted to the ascetic morality upheld in
that work as the proper spiritual path for the upper classes: "Do you
know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over
Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never
experienced before. ... no student has ever studied so much on his
course, and learned so much, as I have this summer" In Chapter VI of A Confession,
Tolstoy quoted the final paragraph of Schopenhauer's work. It explained
how the nothingness that results from complete denial of self is only a
relative nothingness, and is not to be feared. The novelist 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, the
Russian nobleman chose poverty and formal denial of the will: But
this very necessity of involuntary suffering (by poor people) for
eternal salvation is also expressed by that utterance of the Savior (Matthew 19:24):
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a
rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Therefore those who were
greatly in earnest about their eternal salvation, chose voluntary
poverty when fate had denied this to them and they had been born in
wealth. Thus Buddha Sakyamuni was born a prince, but voluntarily took to the mendicant's staff; and Francis of Assisi,
the founder of the mendicant orders who, as a youngster at a ball,
where the daughters of all the notabilities were sitting together, was
asked: "Now Francis, will you not soon make your choice from these
beauties?" and who replied: "I have made a far more beautiful choice!"
"Whom?" "La poverta (poverty)": whereupon he abandoned every thing shortly afterwards and wandered through the land as a mendicant. Tolstoy's Christian beliefs centered on the Sermon on the Mount,
particularly the injunction to turn the other cheek, which he saw as a
justification for pacifism, nonviolence and nonresistance. Various
versions of "Tolstoy's Bible" have been published, indicating the
passages Tolstoy most relied on, specifically, the reported words of
Jesus himself. Tolstoy
believed being a Christian required him to be a pacifist; the
consequences of being a pacifist, and the apparently inevitable waging
of war by government, made him a philosophical anarchist. 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. 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,
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 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 the former or the reader in the latter is
made aware of the foolishness of the protagonists' lives. Tolstoy had a profound influence on the development of Christian anarchist thought. The Tolstoyans were a small Christian anarchist group formed by Tolstoy's companion, Vladimir Chertkov (1854 – 1936), to spread Tolstoy's religious teachings. 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. During the Boxer Rebellion in
China, Tolstoy praised the Boxers. He was harshly critical of the
atrocities committed by the Russians and other western troops. He
accused them of engaging in slaughter when he heard about the lootings,
rapes, and murders, in what he saw as Christian brutality. Tolstoy also
named the two monarchs most responsible for the atrocities; Nicholas II
of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany. Tolstoy also read the works of Chinese thinker and philosopher, Confucius. 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.
In the 1900 essay, "On Anarchy", he wrote; "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. In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindoo outlining
his belief in non-violence as a means for India to gain independence
from British colonial rule. In 1909, a copy of the letter fell into the
hands of Mohandas Gandhi who was working as a lawyer in South Africa at
the time and in the beginnings of becoming an activist. Tolstoy's letter
was significant for Gandhi who wrote to the famous writer seeking proof
that he was the real author, leading to further correspondence between
them. Reading Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You also convinced Gandhi to avoid 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. 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 died in 1910, at the age of 82. He died of pneumonia at Astapovo train
station, after falling ill when he left home in the middle of winter.
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. He had not been at
the peak of health before leaving home; his wife and daughters were all
actively engaged in caring for him daily. He had been speaking and
writing of his own death in the days preceding his departure from home,
but fell ill at the station not far from home. The station master took
Tolstoy to his apartment, where his personal doctors were called to the
scene. He was given injections of morphine and camphor. The
police tried to limit access to his funeral procession, but thousands
of peasants lined the streets at his funeral. Still, some peasants were
heard to say that, other than knowing that "some nobleman had died,"
they knew little else about Tolstoy. A 2009 film about Tolstoy's final year, The Last Station, based on the novel by Jay Parini, was made by director Michael Hoffman with Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoya. Both performers were nominated for Oscars for their roles. There have been other films about the writer, including Departure of a Grand Old Man, made in 1912 just two years after his death, How Fine, How Fresh the Roses Were (1913), and Leo Tolstoy, directed by and starring Sergei Gerasimov in 1984. There is also a famous lost film of Tolstoy made a decade before he died. In 1901, the American travel lecturer Burton Holmes visited Yasnaya Polyana with Albert J. Beveridge,
the U.S. senator and historian. As the three men conversed, Holmes
filmed Tolstoy with his 60-mm movie camera. Afterwards, Beveridge's
advisers succeeded in having the film destroyed, fearing that
documentary evidence of a meeting with the Russian author might hurt
Beveridge's chances of running for the U.S. presidency. |