Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828 (old style calendar), at Yasnaya Polyana, his family's estate roughly 120 miles south of Moscow in Tula province ^[1]. The Tolstoys belonged to the old Russian nobility, and the future writer was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy and Princess Mariya Volkonskaya. His mother died before he turned two, and his father died when the boy was eight, leaving the children in the care of relatives ^[1].

The orphaned Tolstoy was raised partly at Yasnaya Polyana and partly in Kazan, where an aunt became his guardian. In 1844 he entered Kazan University, first studying Oriental languages and then law, but he found formal instruction stifling and left in 1847 without a degree ^[2]. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana intending to manage the estate and educate himself through a self-directed reading program, an ambition recorded in the diaries he kept obsessively for the rest of his life.

Those early diaries reveal a young aristocrat torn between moral self-improvement and the gambling, drinking, and womanizing typical of his class. The habit of ruthless self-examination formed in these years never left him, and it later supplied the psychological depth that distinguishes his fiction ^[2].

Debt and restlessness pushed Tolstoy toward the army. In 1851 he traveled to the Caucasus with his brother Nikolai, an artillery officer, and the following year he enlisted himself ^[1]. While serving there he completed Childhood, an autobiographical novella published in 1852 in the journal The Contemporary under his initials. Critics, including the influential Nikolai Nekrasov, praised the unknown author's psychological precision, and sequels titled Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857) followed ^[3].

Tolstoy's military service culminated in the Crimean War. He was present at the siege of Sevastopol in 1854 and 1855, and his three Sevastopol Sketches gave Russian readers an unsentimental account of combat that anticipated modern war reporting ^[3]. The sketches made him famous in Petersburg literary circles, though he quarreled with the capital's writers, including Ivan Turgenev, and kept his distance from literary factions.

After leaving the army in 1856 he traveled twice through Western Europe. A public execution he witnessed in Paris in 1857 horrified him and deepened his distrust of state power ^[2]. Back home he opened a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, developed his own theories of free education, and published a pedagogical journal, activities that occupied much of his energy in the early 1860s ^[4].

The central Leo Tolstoy achievements are the two long novels he wrote in the fifteen years after his marriage. War and Peace, published serially between 1865 and 1869, follows several aristocratic families through the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812. The book mixes fiction, history, and philosophical argument about the forces that move nations, and it contains more than five hundred characters ^[3]. Contemporaries were unsure what to call it; Tolstoy himself said it was not a novel in the conventional European sense.

Anna Karenina, serialized from 1875 to 1877, is more classically constructed. It sets the adulterous love of Anna and Count Vronsky against the rural marriage of Konstantin Levin, a landowner who shares many of the author's own preoccupations ^[1]. Later writers from Fyodor Dostoevsky to William Faulkner ranked it among the greatest novels ever written, and it remains a fixture of world literature curricula and screen adaptation ^[5].

His achievements did not stop with fiction. A Confession, written around 1879 to 1882, described the spiritual crisis that overtook him at the height of his fame, and the religious and moral essays that followed, including The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), laid out a doctrine of Christian nonviolence and nonresistance to evil ^[6]. He returned to the novel with Resurrection in 1899, publishing it to raise money for the Doukhobors, a persecuted pacifist sect emigrating to Canada ^[4]. His late short fiction, above all The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Hadji Murat (published posthumously), is often judged the equal of anything he wrote.

In September 1862 Tolstoy married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Moscow physician. He was thirty-four. On the eve of the wedding he insisted she read his bachelor diaries, an act of honesty that wounded her and foreshadowed decades of marital turbulence ^[2]. The couple had thirteen children, of whom eight survived to adulthood.

For its first two decades the marriage was largely a working partnership. Sofya managed the household and the estate, bore and raised the children, and copied her husband's tangled manuscripts by hand; she is said to have recopied portions of War and Peace many times over ^[5]. Yasnaya Polyana in these years was the productive center of his life, the place where any Leo Tolstoy biography must locate his greatest work.

His religious conversion strained everything. After roughly 1880 Tolstoy condemned private property, renounced the copyrights to his later works, dressed like a peasant, became a vegetarian, and labored in the fields, while Sofya fought to protect the family income and the earlier copyrights ^[6]. The struggle between husband and wife, and between Sofya and Tolstoy's disciple Vladimir Chertkov, made the final years at Yasnaya Polyana notoriously bitter, and both spouses recorded the misery in dueling diaries ^[7].

By the 1890s Tolstoy was arguably the most famous private citizen in the world. Pilgrims, journalists, and disciples calling themselves Tolstoyans traveled to Yasnaya Polyana to see him, and his opinions on war, capital punishment, and land reform circulated internationally despite Russian censorship ^[4]. During the famine of 1891 and 1892 he organized relief kitchens that fed thousands of peasants, work that embarrassed a government reluctant to admit the scale of the crisis ^[6].

His attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church's alliance with the state provoked an official response: in February 1901 the Holy Synod excommunicated him ^[1]. The act only enlarged his moral authority. He corresponded with reformers and rebels across the world, and his 1908 essay A Letter to a Hindu, addressed to Indian nationalists, reached the young Mahatma Gandhi, who exchanged letters with Tolstoy in the last year of the writer's life and later named his South African commune Tolstoy Farm ^[8].

The end came suddenly. On the night of October 28, 1910 (old style), the eighty-two-year-old count left Yasnaya Polyana in secret, accompanied by his doctor, resolved at last to live out his beliefs away from his wife and household. He fell ill with pneumonia on the journey and was carried into the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, a small railway junction. Reporters and film crews gathered outside as he weakened, and he died there on November 7, 1910 (new style) ^[7]. He was buried without religious rites in the woods at Yasnaya Polyana, at a spot he had chosen in childhood.

Tolstoy's standing as a novelist has never seriously wavered. Writers as different as Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway treated him as the measure of the art, and War and Peace and Anna Karenina continue to sell, and to be filmed and adapted, more than a century after his death ^[5]. Critics prize above all his ability to render ordinary consciousness, what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin analyzed in his famous 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox ^[9].

His political and religious influence proved just as durable. Gandhi acknowledged The Kingdom of God Is Within You as a decisive influence on his philosophy of satyagraha, and through Gandhi the doctrine of nonviolent resistance passed to Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement ^[8]. Tolstoyan communities experimented with pacifism and communal farming in Russia, England, and elsewhere, and his critiques of nationalism and conscription are still cited by peace movements.

Yasnaya Polyana became a state museum in 1921 and is preserved today much as the writer left it, drawing visitors from around the world ^[10]. Among the more curious Leo Tolstoy facts is that he was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize in both literature and peace but never received either, an omission the Swedish Academy has often been criticized for since. The books needed no medal. They made him, in the common judgment of readers and novelists alike, one of the greatest writers who ever lived.