Leo Tolstoy


Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time.
Born to an aristocratic family, Tolstoy achieved acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, and with Sevastopol Sketches, based on his experiences in the Crimean War. His War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, which is based on his "youthful sins," are often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction and three of the greatest novels ever written. His oeuvre includes short stories such as "Alyosha the Pot" and "After the Ball" and novellas such as Family Happiness, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil, and Hadji Murat. He also wrote plays and essays concerning philosophical, moral and religious themes.
In the 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work Confession. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Bevel. He also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George, which he incorporated into his writing, particularly in his novel Resurrection.
Tolstoy received praise from countless authors and critics, both during his lifetime and after. Virginia Woolf called Tolstoy "the greatest of all novelists", and Gary Saul Morson referred to War and Peace as the greatest of all novels. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909. Tolstoy never being awarded a Nobel Prize remains a major Nobel Prize controversy.

Origins

The Tolstoys were a well-known family of old Russian nobility who traced their ancestry to a mythical nobleman named Indris described by Pyotr Tolstoy as arriving "from Nemec, from the lands of Caesar" to Chernigov in 1353 along with his two sons Litvinos and Zimonten and a druzhina of 3000 people. Indris was then converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, under the name of Leonty, and his sons as Konstantin and Feodor. Konstantin's grandson Andrei Kharitonovich was nicknamed Tolstiy by Vasily II of Moscow after he moved from Chernigov to Moscow.
Because of the pagan names and the fact that Chernigov at the time was ruled by Demetrius I Starshy, some researchers concluded that they were Lithuanians who arrived from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At the same time, no mention of Indris was ever found in the 14th-to-16th-century documents, while the Chernigov Chronicles used by Pyotr Tolstoy as a reference were lost. The first documented members of the Tolstoy family also lived during the 17th century, thus Pyotr Tolstoy himself is generally considered the founder of the noble house, being granted the title of count by Peter the Great.

Life and career

Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate southwest of Tula, and south of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, a veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812, and Princess Mariya Tolstaya. His mother died when he was two and his father when he was nine. Tolstoy and his siblings were brought up by relatives. In 1844, he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University, where teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn". Tolstoy left the university in the middle of his studies, returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent much time in Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg, leading a lax and leisurely lifestyle. He began writing during this period, including his first novel Childhood, a fictitious account of his own youth, which was published in 1852. In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War and was in Sevastopol during the 11-month-long siege of Sevastopol in 1854–55, including the Battle of the Chernaya. During the war he was recognised for his courage and promoted to lieutenant. He was appalled by the number of deaths involved in warfare, and left the army after the end of the Crimean War.
His experience in the army, and two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860–61 converted Tolstoy from a dissolute and privileged society author to a non-violent and spiritual anarchist. Others who followed the same path were Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that marked the rest of his life. In a letter to his friend Vasily Botkin, Tolstoy wrote: "The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." Tolstoy's concept of non-violence or ahimsa was bolstered when he read a German version of the Tirukkural. He later instilled the concept in Mahatma Gandhi through his "A Letter to a Hindu" when young Gandhi corresponded with him seeking his advice.
His European trip in 1860–61 shaped both his political and literary development when he met Victor Hugo. Tolstoy read Hugo's newly finished Les Misérables. The similar evocation of battle scenes in Hugo's novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace indicates this influence. Tolstoy's political philosophy was also influenced by a March 1861 visit to French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels. Tolstoy reviewed Proudhon's forthcoming publication, La Guerre et la Paix, and later used the title for his masterpiece. The two men also discussed education, as Tolstoy wrote in his educational notebooks: "If I recount this conversation with Proudhon, it is to show that, in my personal experience, he was the only man who understood the significance of education and of the printing press in our time."
Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded 13 schools for the children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. Tolstoy described the schools' principles in his 1862 essay "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". His educational experiments were short-lived, partly due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police. However, as a direct forerunner to A.S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education.

Personal life

The death of his brother Nikolay in 1860 had an impact on Tolstoy, and led him to a desire to marry. On 23 September 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, who was sixteen years his junior and the daughter of a court physician. She was called Sonya, the Russian diminutive of Sofia, by her family and friends. They had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood:
File:Ge Sophia Tolstaya.jpg|thumb|Tolstoy's wife Sophia and their daughter Alexandra
Tolstoy, on the eve of their marriage, gave her his diaries detailing his extensive sexual past and the fact that one of the serfs on his estate had borne him a son. Even so, their early married life was happy and allowed Tolstoy much freedom and the support system to compose War and Peace and Anna Karenina, with Sonya acting as his secretary, editor, and financial manager. Sonya was copying and hand-writing his epic works time after time. Tolstoy would continue editing War and Peace and had to have clean final drafts to be delivered to the publisher.
However, their later life together has been described by A.N. Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history. Tolstoy's relationship with his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. This saw him seeking to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the renunciation of the copyrights on his earlier works.
When he was finishing up the last installments of Anna Karenina Tolstoy was in an anguished state of mind and he began putting away guns and ropes out of fear that he would kill himself.
Some members of the Tolstoy family left Russia in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution, or after the establishment of the Soviet Union following the 1917 October Revolution, and many of Leo Tolstoy's relatives and descendants today live in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States. Tolstoy's son, Count Lev Lvovich Tolstoy, settled in Sweden and married a Swedish woman, and their descendants with family names including Tolstoy, Paus and Ceder still live in Sweden. The Paus branch of the family is also closely related to Henrik Ibsen. Leo Tolstoy's last surviving grandchild, Countess Tatiana Tolstoy-Paus, died in 2007 at Herresta manor in Sweden, which is owned by Tolstoy's descendants. Swedish writer Daria Paus and jazz singer Viktoria Tolstoy are among Leo Tolstoy's Swedish descendants.
One of his great-great-grandsons, Vladimir Tolstoy, has been a director of the Yasnaya Polyana museum since 1994 and an adviser to the President of Russia on cultural affairs since 2012. Ilya Tolstoy's great-grandson, Pyotr Tolstoy, is a well-known Russian journalist and TV presenter as well as a State Duma deputy since 2016. His cousin Fyokla Tolstaya, daughter of the acclaimed Soviet Slavist Nikita Tolstoy , is also a Russian journalist, TV and radio host.