Biography Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
(1828 – 1910)
(1828-1910), Earl, Russian writer, Corresponding Member (1873), Honorary Academician (1900) of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Beginning with the autobiographical trilogy “Childhood” (1852), “Adolescence” (1852-54), “Youth” (1855-57), a study of the “fluidity” of the inner world, the moral foundations of the personality became the main theme of Tolstoy’s works. The painful search for the meaning of life, the moral ideal, the hidden general patterns of being, spiritual and social criticism, revealing the “untruth” of class relations, go through all of his work. In the novel “The Cossacks” (1863), a hero, a young nobleman, is looking for a way out in the introduction to nature, to the natural and integral life of the common man. The epic “War and Peace” (1863-69) recreates the life of various strata of Russian society in the Patriotic War of 1812, the patriotic
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TOLSTOY Lev Nikolaevich [August 28 (September 9) 1828, the Yasnaya Polyana estate of the Tula Province on November 7 (20), 1910, Astapovo station (now Leo Tolstoy station) of the Ryazan-Ural railway station. e. buried in Yasnaya Polyana], Count, Russian writer.
“Joyful period of childhood”
Tolstoy was the fourth child in a large noble family. His mother, nee Princess Volkonskaya, died when Tolstoy was not yet two years old, but according to the stories of family members, he was well aware of “her spiritual appearance”: some features of the mother (brilliant education, sensitivity to art, a tendency to reflect) and even portrait Tolstoy gave similarity to Princess Marya Nikolaevna Bolkonskaya (“War and Peace”). Tolstoy’s father, a participant of the Patriotic War, remembered the writer’s good-natured, mocking character, his love of reading, hunting (served as the prototype of Nicholas Rostov), also died early (1837). The upbringing of children involved a distant relative TA Ergolskaya, who had a huge influence on Tolstoy: “she taught me the spiritual pleasure of love.” Children’s memories were always the most joyous for Tolstoy:
Kazan University
When Tolstoy was 13 years old, the family moved to Kazan, to the home of the relative and guardian of the children PI Yushkova. In 1844, Tolstoy entered the Kazan University at the Department of Oriental Languages of the Faculty of Philosophy, then transferred to the Faculty of Law, where he studied for an incomplete two years: lessons did not arouse his interest and he passionately surrendered to secular entertainment. In the spring of 1847, having submitted a petition for dismissal from the university “for frustrated health and home circumstances,” Tolstoy left for Yasnaya Polyana with the firm intention of studying the entire course of jurisprudence (to pass the exam externally), “practical medicine,” languages, agriculture, history, geographic statistics, write a dissertation and “achieve the highest degree of perfection in music and painting.”
“The stormy life of the youth period”
After a summer in the village, disappointed by the unsuccessful experience of managing on new, profitable conditions for serfdom (this attempt is embodied in the novel The Morning of the Landlord, 1857), in the autumn of 1847 Tolstoy left first for Moscow and then for St. Petersburg to hold the candidate examinations at the university. The image of his life during this period often changed: he prepared and passed exams for days, then passionately gave himself to music, then he intended to start a career career, then he dreamed of becoming a cadet in the Horse Guards Regiment. Religious moods that reached asceticism, alternated with binges, cards, trips to the gypsies. In the family he was considered “the most trifling small,” and he made debts he made only many years later. However, it is these years that are marked by intense introspection and self-control, as reflected in the diary, which Tolstoy led throughout his life. Then he had a serious desire to write and the first unfinished art sketches appeared.
“War and freedom”
In 1851, Nikolai’s older brother, an officer in the army, persuaded Tolstoy to go to the Caucasus together. Almost three years Tolstoy lived in the Cossack village on the bank of the Terek, leaving for Kizlyar, Tiflis, Vladikavkaz and participating in military operations (first voluntarily, then was recruited). The Caucasian nature and the patriarchal simplicity of Cossack life, which struck Tolstoy in contrast to the life of the aristocratic circle and with the painful reflection of the man of an educated society, provided material for the autobiographical novel The Cossacks (1852-63). The Caucasian impressions were reflected in the stories “The Raid” (1853), “Felling of the Forest” (1855), and also in the later novel “Hadji Murat” (1896-1904, published in 1912). Returning to Russia, Tolstoy wrote in his diary that he loved this “wild land,
The Crimean campaign
In 1854, Tolstoy was appointed to the Danube Army, in Bucharest. The boring staff life soon forced him to transfer to the Crimean army, besieged Sevastopol, where he commanded the battery on the 4th bastion, displaying rare personal courage (awarded the Order of St. Anne and medals). In the Crimea, Tolstoy captured new impressions and literary plans (he was going to publish a magazine for soldiers, among others), he began to write a series of “Sevastopol short stories”, soon printed and had a huge success (an essay “Sevastopol in December” was read by Alexander II ). Tolstoy’s first works impressed literary critics with the boldness of psychological analysis and the detailed picture of the “dialectic of the soul” (NG Chernyshevsky). Some of the ideas that appeared in these years,
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November 1855, Tolstoy came to St. Petersburg and immediately entered the circle of “Contemporary” (NA Nekrasov, IS Turgenev, AN Ostrovsky, IA Goncharov, etc.) where he was greeted as “the great hope of Russian literature” (Nekrasov). Tolstoy took part in dinners and readings, in the establishment of the Literary Fund, was involved in the disputes and conflicts of writers, but felt himself a stranger in this environment, as he later described in detail in Confessions (1879-82): “These people have disgusted me, and to myself I have become disgusted. ” In the autumn of 1856 Tolstoy, having retired, left for Yasnaya Polyana, and in the beginning of 1857 went abroad. He visited France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany (the Swiss impressions are reflected in the story “Lucerne”), in the autumn he returned to Moscow, and then to Yasnaya Polyana.
In 1859 Tolstoy opened a school for peasant children in the countryside, helped to organize more than 20 schools in the vicinity of Yasnaya Polyana, and this occupation fascinated Tolstoy so much that in 1860 he again went abroad to get acquainted with the schools of Europe. Tolstoy traveled a lot, spent a month and a half in London (where he often saw AI Herzen), was in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, studied popular pedagogical systems, mostly unsatisfactory to the writer. Tolstoy expounded his own ideas in special articles, arguing that the basis of education should be “student’s freedom” and the rejection of violence in teaching. In 1862 he published a pedagogical journal “Yasnaya Polyana” with books for reading as an appendix, which became in Russia the same classic examples of children’s and folk literature, as well as those compiled by him in the early 1870’s. “ABC” and “New Alphabet”. In 1862, in the absence of Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, a search was conducted (they searched for a secret printing house).
“War and Peace” (1863-69)
In September 1862, Tolstoy married the eighteen-year-old daughter of a doctor Sofya Andreevna Bers and immediately after the wedding took his wife from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana, where he devoted himself completely to family life and economic concerns. However, from the autumn of 1863 he was captured by a new literary concept, which for a long time was called “The Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifth Year”. The time of creation of the novel was a period of spiritual uplift, family happiness and quiet secluded work. Tolstoy read memoirs and correspondence of people of the Alexandrian epoch (including the materials of Tolstoys and Volkonskikhs), worked in archives, studied Masonic manuscripts, went to the Borodino field, moved slowly through the editorial office (through copying manuscripts, his wife helped him a lot, refuting thus joking friends that she is still so young, as if playing dolls), and it was not until early 1865 that the first part of “War and Peace” was published in Russkiy Vestnik. The novel was read aloud, caused many responses, striking a combination of a wide epic canvas with a subtle psychological analysis, with a living picture of private life, organically inscribed in history. Hot debates provoked subsequent parts of the novel, in which Tolstoy developed a fatalistic philosophy of history. There were reproaches that the writer “confronted” people of the beginning of the century with the intellectual demands of his era: the idea of the novel about the Patriotic War was indeed a response to the problems that worried the Russian post-reform society. Tolstoy himself characterized his plan as an attempt to “write the history of the people” and considered it impossible to determine its genre nature (“does not fit into any form, no novel, no story,
“Anna Karenina” (1873-77)
In the 1870s, while still living in Yasnaya Polyana, continuing to teach peasant children and developing his pedagogical views in the press, Tolstoy worked on a novel about the life of contemporary society by building a composition on the opposition of two plot lines: Anna Karenina’s family drama is painted in contrast to the life and home idyll of the young landowner Konstantin Levin, who is close to the writer himself and in his way of life, both in his convictions and in his psychological drawing. The beginning of the work coincided with the enthusiasm for Pushkin’s prose: Tolstoy strove for the simplicity of the syllable, for the external non-price tone, paving his way to a new style of the 1880s, especially to folk tales. Only tendentious criticism interpreted the novel as a love story. The meaning of the existence of the “educated class” and the deep truth of peasant life this range of issues, who was close to Levin and alien to even the most sympathetic heroes (including Anna), sounded acutely publicistic for many contemporaries, especially for FM Dostoevsky, who highly appreciated Anna Karenina in The Diary of a Writer. “The idea of a family” (the main in the novel, according to Tolstoy) is translated into the social channel, the merciless self-exposure of Levin, his thoughts on suicide are read as a figurative illustration of the spiritual crisis experienced by Tolstoy himself in the 1880s, but matured in the course of work on the novel.
Fracture (1880s)
The course of the revolution that took place in Tolstoy’s mind was reflected in artistic creativity, primarily in the experiences of heroes, in the spiritual insight that refracts their lives. These heroes occupy the central place in the stories “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1884-86), “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1887-89, published in Russia in 1891), “Father Sergius” (1890-98, published in 1912), the drama ” The Living Corpse “(1900, unfinished, published in 1911), in the story” After the Ball “(1903, published in 1911). Tolstoy’s confessional publicism gives a detailed idea of his spiritual drama: drawing pictures of social inequality and idleness of the educated strata, Tolstoy, in a pointed form, set himself and before society the questions of the meaning of life and faith, criticized all state institutions, reaching the denial of science, art, court, marriage, achievements of civilization. A new world outlook of the writer is reflected in the “Confession” (published in 1884 in Geneva, in 1906 in Russia), in articles “On the Census in Moscow” (1882), “So What Should We Do?” (1882-86, published in full in 1906), “On the Hunger” (1891, published in English in 1892, in Russian in 1954), “What is art?” (1897-98), “Slavery of Our Time” (1900, fully published in Russia in 1917), “On Shakespeare and the Drama” (1906), “I Can not Be Silent” (1908). Tolstoy’s social declaration is based on the idea of Christianity as a moral teaching, and the ethical ideas of Christianity are comprehended by him in a humanistic manner as the basis of the worldwide brotherhood of people. This complex of problems presupposed an analysis of the Gospel and critical studies of theological writings devoted to the religious and philosophical treatises of Tolstoy “The Study of Dogmatic Theology” (1879-80), “The Connection and Translation of the Four Gospels” (1880-81), “What is My Faith” ( 1884), “The Kingdom of God is within you” (1893). A violent reaction in society was accompanied by Tolstoy’s calls for direct and immediate adherence to the Christian commandments. Particularly widely discussed was his preaching of non-resistance to evil by violence, which became the impetus for the creation of a whole series of works of drama “The Power of Darkness, or Claws, the Abyss” (1887) and folk tales written in an intentionally simplified, “artless” manner. Along with the closely related works of V. M.
In the framework of a new worldview and ideas about Christianity, Tolstoy opposed Christian dogma and criticized the rapprochement of the church with the state, which led him to complete disunity with the Orthodox Church. In 1901, the reaction of the Synod followed: the world-famous writer and preacher was officially excommunicated, which caused a huge public response.
“Resurrection” (1889-99)
Tolstoy’s last novel embodied the entire spectrum of problems that had worried him during the years of the crisis. The main character, Dmitry Nekhlyudov, spiritually close to the author, goes the way of moral purification, leading him to active good. The narrative is built on a system of emphatically evaluative oppositions, exposing the irrationality of the social order (the beauty of nature and the deceitfulness of the social world, the truth of peasant life and the falsity prevailing in the life of the educated strata of society). Characteristic features of the late Tolstoy frank, highlighted by the “trend” (in these years, Tolstoy supporter of deliberately tendentious, didactic art), sharp criticism, satirical beginning manifested in the novel with all visibility.
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