Leo Tolstoy

Paradox and contradiction surround the gigantic figure of Tolstoy. The author of two of the greatest novels ever written, Tolstoy repudiated both, as well as the works of SHAKESPEARE [1], as “bad art,” unworthy of the moral teaching that his later life demanded. A member of Russia’s aristocracy, Tolstoy trans-formed himself from an idle and dissolute creature of his class into a supreme novelist with unrivaled imaginative powers, and then became a prophetic sage who tried to conform to a comprehensive vision of primitive Christian simplicity. In a sense, Tolstoy’s determined search for meaning, which forms the core of his books, is the one constant in an otherwise tangled life. Few authors have embodied their discoveries as relentlessly as Tolstoy, but it is Tolstoy the artist, not Tolstoy the holy man, who continues to speak to us. As John Bayley, in his critical study Tolstoy and the Novel, observed, “No one who is not interested in himself can be interested in a great novel, and in Tolstoy we experience in greater measure than in any other novelist the recognition of ourselves that leads to increased self-knowledge.”

Tolstoy was born in 1828 into a wealthy, noble family and grew up on the Tolstoy estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow. Both his parents died while he was a child, and he was reared by relatives and educated by private tutors. After three years as a student at Kazan University, he returned home to manage the estate and to live an aimless and pleasure-seeking life among upper-class circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow. At the age of 23, Tolstoy entered the army as an artillery officer and campaigned against the Caucasian hill tribes and helped defend Sevastopol during the Crimean War. While in the army, he developed an addiction to gambling as well as a determination to become a writer. His first works reflect his war experiences and his recollections of childhood. 

Published in Russian magazines, Tolstoy’s early fiction announced the arrival of promising liter-ary talent, part of the extraordinary flowering of Russian fiction in the 19th century, whose masters included Turgenev and DOSTOEVSKY [14]. Tolstoy traveled in Europe before marrying in 1862, then settled down to raise a family of 13 children. He reorganized his estate to reflect the principles of peasantry reform, including land ownership and improved education for his serfs, which interested him.

Between 1863 and 1877, Tolstoy wrote his two great masterpieces, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). The first is a grand Russian epic that depicts the events of Napoleon’s invasion through the affairs of several Russian families. War and Peace particularly concerns the search by two men, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezuhov, for significance and meaning in their lives. The second novel, one of the great love stories in world literature, traces the adulterous affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexey Vronsky to Anna’s destruction when she refuses to conform to the hypocritical values of upper-class morality. Anna’s tragedy is paralleled by a search for an alternative to society’s values by Levin, who finds his answers domestically among the peasants on his estate.

The conflict Tolstoy explored in both novels between self-fulfillment and society, as well as history’s grip on the individual, produced a personal crisis and the beginning of a quest for answers that he discovered in a unique blend of primitive Christianity, faith in simple peasant values derived from a close relationship to the land, and the renunciation of government, private property, and organized religion. He spent the rest of his life attempting to live according to his precepts and writing books that embodied his philosophy. Although Tolstoy the moralist predominates over Tolstoy the artist during this period, with his great gift for capturing the vitality and variety of life and human experience, some of his works after his conversion are among his finest, particularly “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) and “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1891). 

Tolstoy’s mysticism and asceticism attracted devoted followers but largely alienated him from his wife and family. He caught a chill and died in the house of a stationmaster while attempting to escape their control on a journey to a monastery.A fascination with Tolstoy’s remarkable life and philosophy has dominated the appreciation of his work. The genius that created such massive portraits of lived experience seems to dwarf and make irrelevant any consideration of his artistry and the means he used to create his novels. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT [30], in offering his opinion of War and Peace, provides a typical judgment. Complaining of the weakness of the novel’s conclusion, Flaubert observed: “The first two volumes are sublime, but the third goes downhill dreadfully. 

He repeats himself. And he philosophizes. In a word here one sees the gentle-man, the author, and the Russian, whereas hitherto one had seen only Nature and Humanity.” At his best, Tolstoy possessed an unprecedented capacity for entering the life around him to such an imaginative degree that the art that produces his effects dissolves, and the reader seems to directly perceive life itself.The standard that Tolstoy set, like that of Shakespeare, seems impossibly high. Additionally, in most instances Tolstoy’s novels defy the structural logic of other European novels with their aesthetic of tight control and authorial distancing. HENRY JAMES [38] called Tolstoy’s kind of novels “loose, baggy monsters,” and Tolstoy seems much closer stylistically to CHARLES DICKENS [6], whom Tolstoy greatly admired, than to Flaubert and James himself. 

Tolstoy’s novels are expansive, pushing outward toward the panoramic; they are novels of the social group, large enough to accommodate the widest possible vision of society and human experience.We come to know Tolstoy’s characters as intimates, far more real to us than most of the people we know in life. Isaiah Berlin has written that “no author who has ever lived has shown such a power of insight into the variety of life—the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer.” Perhaps fellow Russian writer Isaac Babel put it best when he asserted, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”If his novels contain multitudes, Tolstoy is no less adept at pushing the local and the temporal into universal relevance. With War and Peace, Tolstoy reconfigures the history of Russia’s patriotic resistance to Napoleon into a national epic that was embraced even by the Soviet regime, although Soviet leaders privately considered Tolstoy’s work to be counter revolutionary. 

During World War II and the Nazi invasion, Tolstoy was the most published author in Russia, and relevant sections of War and Peace were posted on Mos-cow’s streets for inspiration. Although both War and Peace and Anna Karenina are firmly rooted in their time and place, neither are restricted by them, as Tolstoy pursues larger truths of history and human nature. 

In the end, Tolstoy’s pursuit of truth led him beyond fiction and illusion to realize a version of his revelations about humanity and spirituality in his own life. As Vladimir Nabokov observed:What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck. 

But the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is homogeneous. . . . Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all the obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenina, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth— this truth was he and this he was an art.

Most will agree with Nabokov that it is Tolstoy the artist rather than Tolstoy the mystic philosopher who compels our attention, and that his sublime fram-ing of the expansive questions of life satisfy more than the narrower answers for which he eventually settled.