Leo Tolstoy

Life

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow, into one of Russia’s old aristocratic families. Both parents died before he was ten and he was raised by relatives. He studied law and oriental languages at Kazan University without finishing, ran up gambling debts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and in 1851 joined his brother in the army in the Caucasus. He served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War and his Sevastopol Sketches, based on the siege, made him known as a writer.

He left the army in 1856, traveled in Europe, and settled at Yasnaya Polyana, where he founded a school for peasant children and in 1862 married Sofia Behrs. The next fifteen years produced War and Peace and Anna Karenina and a large family; the Tolstoys had thirteen children. Toward the end of Anna Karenina he went through a spiritual crisis, described in A Confession, and emerged with a radical Christianity that rejected the Orthodox Church, the state, private property and violence.

The last three decades of his life were given to religious and moral writing, to practical work on behalf of famine victims and persecuted sects, and to a growing international following. He was excommunicated in 1901. The strain between his convictions and the life of his estate, and between him and his wife, became unbearable, and in November 1910 he left home secretly, fell ill on the way, and died at the railway station of Astapovo at eighty-two.

Literary significance

Tolstoy is, with Dostoyevsky, one of the two Russian novelists against whom the European novel is measured, and the two are usually set in contrast: Dostoyevsky the writer of extremes and ideas, Tolstoy the writer of ordinary life seen with unusual clarity. War and Peace and Anna Karenina are routinely placed at or near the top of lists of the greatest novels, and his later short fiction, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murat, is admired as much by writers as the long books.

His influence outside literature was also large. His doctrine of nonviolent resistance shaped Gandhi, with whom he corresponded, and through him later movements.

Where to start

Anna Karenina is in this library and is the better first choice; it is long but has a single clear story. War and Peace, also here, is for readers who want more.