Leo Tolstoy. Biography and complete works

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Author: Tolstoy, Leo

Date and Place of birth:
b. September 9,1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Russia
d. November 20, 1910, Yasnaya Polyana, Russia

Life and Works:

Russian author, one of the greatest of all novelists. Tolstoy's major works include War and Peace (1863-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-77), which stands alongside Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest as perhaps the most prominent 19th-century European novel of adultery.

Leo Tolstoy was born September 9,1828 at his family's estate known as Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula Province, the fourth of five children. The title of Count had been conferred on his ancestor in the early 18th century by Peter the Great. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by relatives. Their aunt becomes the head mother figure of the house.

In 1835 Tolstoy's older brother Nikolai tells an impressionable Tolstoy he has written the secret that will make all men happy on a green stick and buried by the ravine in the Kakaz forest.

In 1844 Tolstoy started his studies of law and oriental languages at Kazan University, but he never took a degree, he was a poor student. This same year his brothers take him to a brothol where he loses his virginity. This has a profound impact on him.

Dissatisfied with the standard of education, Tolstoy leaves the University. He inherits the 4,000 acre estate of Yasnaya Polyana and begins to keep a journal. This same year he moves to Moscow and becomes obsessed with gambling. In 1847 Tolstoy was treated for venereal disease.

In 1849 Tolstoy moves to St. Petersburg to take his law exams but runs up a huge gambling debts. He sells some of his estate to cover the cost. In 1850 he returns to Moscow. His gambling debts continue to grow forcing him to log his forests and pawn his watch. He is unable to live the virtuous life he wants and spends many nights drinking and gambling.

Tolstoy accompanied in 1851 his elder brother Nikolay to the Caucasus, and joined an artillery regiment. He is transferred with his brother to the Caucuses. In the 1850s Tolstoy also began his literary career, publishing the autobiographical trilogy Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857).

During the Crimean War Tolstoy commanded a battery, witnessing the siege of Sebastopol (1854-55). In1856 His brother Demitry dies of tuberculosis. Tolstoy tries to free his serfs and transfer the land they work. Suspicious they refuse the offer.

In 1857 he visited France, Switzerland, and Germany. After his travels Tolstoy settled in Yasnaya Polyana, where he started a school for peasant children founded on his own pedagogical ideas. Has a relationship with a married peasant who bears him a son, Timothy.

He saw that the secret of changing the world lay in education. He investigated during further travels to Europe (1860-61) educational theory and practice, and published magazines and textbooks on the subject.

In 1862 he married Sonya Andreyevna Behrs (1844-1919) , age 17. Much of their courtship is reflected in Levin and Kitty's relationship in Anna Karenina. She bore him 13 children. Sonya also acted as her husband's devoted secretary.

Tolstoy's fiction grew originally out of his diaries, in which he tried to understand his own feelings and actions so as to control them. He read widely fiction and philosophy.

Tolstoy's major work, War and Peace, appeared between the years 1865 and 1869. The epic tale depicted the story of five families against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional.

War and Peace reflected Tolstoy's view that all is predestined, but we cannot live unless we imagine that we have free will. The harshest judgment is reserved for Napoleon, who thinks he controls events, but is dreadfully mistaken.

Tolstoy's other masterpiece, Anna Karenina (1873-77), told a tragic story of a married woman, who follows her lover, but finally at a station throws herself in front of an incoming train. Tolstoy saw that everywhere the family life of the landed gentry was breaking up, but he did not accept nihilist theories about marriage. First Anna agrees to end the affair, but when Vronskii is injured in an accident, she resumes the relationship. Anna gives birth to their child, and Karenin finally agrees to allow Anna to run away to Italy with Vronskii. However, she believes that he no longer loves her, and commits suicide.

In 1878, at age 50 Tolstoy is finally able to resolve a significant internal conflict and accepts christianity. Most scholars divide his life into pre and post conversion.

After finishing Anna Karenina Tolstoy renounced all his earlier works. "I wrote everything into Anna Karenina," he later confessed, "and nothing was left over." Voskresenia (1899, Resurrection) was Tolstoy's last major novel.

The Kreutzer Sonata (1890) is written in the form of a frame-story and set on a train. The conversations among the passengers develop into a discussion of the institution of marriage. After writing the novel Tolstoy was accused of preaching immorality. The Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod wrote to the tsar, and this marked the beginning of the process that led ultimately to Tolstoy's excommunication. Tolstoy was forced to write in 1890 a postscript in which he attempted to explain his unorthodox views.

In the 1880s Tolstoy wrote such philosophical works as A Confession and What I Believe, which was banned in 1884. He started to see himself more as a sage and moral leader than an artist. In 1884 occurred his first attempt to leave home. He gave up his estate to his family, and tried to live as a poor, celibate peasant. In 1901 the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated the author. Tolstoy became seriously ill and he recuperated in Crimea.

In 1880, to prevent Sonya from leaving she is given power of attorney. Tolstoy meets and forms a close bond with Chertkov, an officer in the army, who becomes Sonya's main rival.

In 1891 Tolstoy declares he will give all his possessions to his serfs. After his sons and Sonya object he agrees to leave the estate to the family.

In 1902 he writes a letter to the Tsar warning him of civil war unless the tsar grant Russia it's freedom. In 1907, having been exiled 10 years earlier Tolstoy and Chertkov resume their friendship. Tolstoy grants him increasingly more editorial privileges. Sonya and Chertkov remain enemies. One year later Tolstoy writes a will relinquishing all copyrights.

Behind Sonya's back Chertkov writes a new will for Tolstoy. This will gives Chertkov rights to Tolstoy's works and diaries.

After leaving his estate with his disciple Vladimir Chertkov on the urge to live as a wandering ascetic, Tolstoy died of pneumonia on November 20 in 1910, at a remote railway junction. He is buried, as requested, by the "green stick" his brother told him about in his childhood.

Tolstoy's Collected Works, which were published in the Soviet Union in 1928-58, consisted of 90 volumes.

In his study What is Art? (1898) Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Dante, but not really convincingly. He stated that art is a conveyor of feelings, good and bad, from the artist to others. Through feeling, the artist 'infects' another with the desire to act well or badly.

Tolstoy used ordinary events and characters to examine war, religion, feminism, and other topics. He was convinced that philosophical principles could only be understood in their concrete expression in history. All of his work is characterized by uncomplicated style, careful construction, and deep insight into human nature. His chapters are short, and he paid much attention to the details of everyday life. Tolstoy also refused to recognize the conventional climaxes of narrative - War and Peace begins in the middle of a conversation and ends in the first epilogue in the middle of a sentence.

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