Leo
Tolstoy was born on 09.09.1828 at his family's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the
Tula Province of Russia. He was the youngest of four boys. In 1830, when
Tolstoy's mother, née Princess Volkonskaya, died, his father's cousin took over
caring for the children. When their father, Count Nikolay Tolstoy, died just
seven years later, their aunt was appointed their legal guardian. When the aunt
passed away, Tolstoy and his siblings moved in with a second aunt, in Kazan,
Russia. Although Tolstoy experienced a lot of loss at an early age, he would
later idealize his childhood memories in his writing.
Tolstoy
received his primary education at home, at the hands of French and German
tutors. In 1843, he enrolled in an Oriental languages program at the University
of Kazan. There, Tolstoy failed to excel as a student. His low grades forced
him to transfer to an easier law program.
Prone
to partyin in excess, Tolstoy ultimately left the University of Kazan in 1847,
without a degree. He returned to his parents' estate, where he made a go at
becoming a farmer. He attempted to lead the serfs, or farmhands, in their work,
but he was too often absent on social visits to Tula and Moscow.
His
stab at becoming the perfect farmer soon proved to be a failure. He did,
however, succeed in pouring his energies into keeping a journal—the beginning
of a lifelong habit that would inspire much of his fiction.
As
Tolstoy was flailing on the farm, his older brother, Nikolay, came to visit
while on military leave. Nikolay convinced Tolstoy to join the Army as a
junker, south in the Caucasus Mountains, where Nikolay himself was stationed.
Following
his stint as a junker, Tolstoy transferred to Sevastopol in Ukraine in November
1854, where he fought in the Crimean War through August 1855.
During
quiet periods while Tolstoy was a junker in the Army, he worked on an
autobiographical story called Childhood. In it, he wrote of his fondest
childhood memories.
In
1852, Tolstoy submitted the sketch to The Contemporary, the most popular
journal of the time. The story was eagerly accepted and became Tolstoy's very
first published work.
After
completing Childhood, Tolstoy started writing about his day-to-day life at the
Army outpost in the Caucasus. However, he did not complete the work, entitled
The Cossacks, until 1862, after he had already left the Army.
Amazingly,
Tolstoy still managed to continue writing while at battle during the Crimean
War. During that time, he composed Boyhood (1854), a sequel to Childhood, the
second book in what was to become Tolstoy's autobiographical trilogy.
In
the midst of the Crimean War, Tolstoy also expressed his views on the striking
contradictions of war through a three-part series, Sevastopol Tales. In the
second Sevastopol Tales book, Tolstoy experimented with a relatively new
writing technique: Part of the story is presented in the form of a soldier's
stream of consciousness.
Once
the Crimean War ended and Tolstoy left the Army, he returned to Russia. Back
home, the burgeoning author found himself in high demand on the St. Petersburg
literary scene. Stubborn and arrogant, Tolstoy refused to ally himself with any
particular intellectual school of thought.
Declaring
himself an anarchist, he made off to Paris in 1857. Once there, he gambled away
all of his money and was forced to return home to Russia. He also managed to publish
Youth, the third part of his autobiographical trilogy, in 1857.
Back
in Russia in 1862, Tolstoy produced the first of a 12 issue-installment of the
journal Yasnaya Polyana, marrying a doctor's daughter named Sofya Andreyevna
Bers that same year.
Residing
at Yasnaya Polyana with his wife and children, Tolstoy spent the better part of
the 1860s toiling over his first great novel, War and Peace. A portion of the
novel was first published in the Russian Messenger in 1865, under the title
"The Year 1805." By 1868, he had released three more chapters. A year
later, the novel was complete. Both critics and the public were buzzing about
the novel's historical accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, combined with its
thoughtful development of realistic yet fictional characters. The novel also
uniquely incorporated three long essays satirizing the laws of history.
Among
the ideas that Tolstoy extols in War and Peace is the belief that the quality
and meaning of one's life is mainly derived from his day-to-day activities
Following
the success of War and Peace, in 1873, Tolstoy set to work on the second of his
best known novels, Anna Karenina. Like War and Peace, Anna Karenina
fictionalized some biographical events from Tolstoy's life, as was particularly
evident in the romance of the characters Kitty and Levin, whose relationship is
said to resemble Tolstoy's courtship with his own wife.
The
first sentence of Anna Karenina is among the most famous lines of the book:
"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy
in its own way." Anna Karenina was published in installments from 1873 to
1877, to critical and public acclaim.
Despite
the success of Anna Karenina, following the novel's completion, Tolstoy
suffered a spiritual crisis and grew depressed. Struggling to uncover the
meaning of life, Tolstoy first went to the Russian Orthodox Church, but did not
find the answers he sought there. He came to believe that Christian churches
were corrupt and, in lieu of organized religion, developed his own beliefs.
He
decided to express those beliefs by founding a new publication called The
Mediator in 1883.As a consequence of espousing his unconventional—and therefore
controversial—spiritual beliefs, Tolstoy was ousted by the Russian Orthodox
Church. He was even watched by the secret police. When Tolstoy's new beliefs
prompted his desire to give away his money, his wife strongly objected. The
disagreement put a strain on the couple's marriage, until Tolstoy begrudgingly
agreed to a compromise: He conceded to granting his wife the copyrights—and
presumably the royalties—to all of his writing predating 1881.
In
addition to his religious tracts, Tolstoy continued to write fiction throughout
the 1880s and 1890s. Among his later works' genres were moral tales and
realistic fiction.
One
of his most successful later works was the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich,
written in 1886. In Ivan Ilyich, the main character struggles to come to grips
with his impending death.
The
title character, Ivan Ilyich, comes to the jarring realization that he has
wasted his life on trivial matters, but the realization comes too late.
In
1898, Tolstoy wrote Father Sergius, a work of fiction in which he seems to
criticize the beliefs that he developed following his spiritual conversion. The
following year, he wrote his third lengthy novel, Resurrection. While the work
received some praise, it hardly matched the success and acclaim of his previous
novels.
Tolstoy's other late works include essays on
art, a satirical play called The Living Corpse that he wrote in 1890, and a
novella called Hadji-Murad (written in 1904), which was discovered and
published after his death.
Over
the last 30 years of his life, Tolstoy established himself as a moral and
religious leader.
His
ideas about nonviolent resistance to evil influenced the likes of social leader
Mahatma Gandhi.
Also
during his later years, Tolstoy reaped the rewards of international acclaim.
Yet he still struggled to reconcile his spiritual beliefs with the tensions
they created in his home life. His wife not only disagreed with his teachings,
she disapproved of his disciples, who regularly visited Tolstoy at the family
estate.
Their
troubled marriage took on an air of notoriety in the press. Anxious to escape
his wife's growing resentment, in October 1910, Tolstoy, his daughter,
Aleksandra, and his physician, Dr.
Dushan P. Makovitski, embarked on a pilgrimage. Valuing their privacy, they
traveled incognito, hoping to dodge the press, to no avail.
Unfortunately,
the pilgrimage proved too arduous for the aging novelist. In November 1910, the
stationmaster of a train depot in Astapovo, Russia opened his home to Tolstoy,
allowing the ailing writer to rest. Tolstoy died there shortly after, on
November 20, 1910.
He
was buried at the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula Province, where
Tolstoy had lost so many loved ones yet had managed to build such fond and
lasting memories of his childhood. Tolstoy was survived by his wife and their
brood of 8 children.
To
this day, Tolstoy's novels are considered among the finest achievements of
literary work. War and Peace is, in fact, frequently cited as the greatest
novel ever written. In contemporary academia, Tolstoy is still widely
acknowledged as having possessed a gift for describing characters' unconscious
motives.He is also championed for his finesse in underscoring the role of
people's everyday actions in defining their character and purpose.To read more www.biography.com/people/leo-tolstoy-9508518
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