Quick
Overview
His
Life
His
Works
Homer,
Shakespeare, and Tolstoy: What Literature Teaches About the Collapse and
Recovery of Home and Family
Lecture given to the Heritage Foundation, October 19, 1995.
His
Life
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 20th-century 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. 
Tolstoy in 1854
The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy
was born on Aug. 28 (Sept. 9, New Style),
1828, at the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana (about 130 miles
[210 kilometres] south of Moscow in Tula province), 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, 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 Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws and Catherine II 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 Caucasian
tribes 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.
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.
"Leo Tolstoy" Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=macro/5006/31.html>
[Accessed 24 April 1998].