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| Lev Tolstoy |
Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of Jordi Santanyí, one of her closest friends.
Jordi is a writer and he loves Literature. He spends hours and hours talking with The Grandma about authors and their works. They have been talking about Lev Tolstoy, the Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time who was born on a day like today in 1828.
Jordi and The Grandma think that the best way to pay homage to Lev Tolstoy is talking about his life and his unforgettable novels.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, in Russian Лев Николаевич Толстой (9 September 1828-20 November 1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time.
He received multiple nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902 and 1910 and the fact that he never won is a major Nobel prize controversy.
Born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1828, he is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852-1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War.
Tolstoy's fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Family Happiness (1859), and Hadji Murad (1912). He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.
More information: Literariness
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 A Confession (1882). 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.
Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Tolstoy also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George, which he incorporated into his writing, particularly Resurrection (1899).
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| Lev Tolstoy |
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. 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. 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.
Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate 12 kilometres southwest of Tula, Russia, and 200 kilometres south of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy (1794-1837), a veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812, and Countess 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.
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.
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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, War and Peace in French, 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.
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| Lev Tolstoy |
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.
Tolstoy is considered one of the giants of Russian literature; his works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina and novellas such as Hadji Murad and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Tolstoy's earliest works, the autobiographical novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852-1856), tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the chasm between himself and his peasants. Though he later rejected them as sentimental, a great deal of Tolstoy's own life is revealed. They retain their relevance as accounts of the universal story of growing up.
Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastopol Sketches. His experiences in battle helped stir his subsequent pacifism and gave him material for realistic depiction of the horrors of war in his later work.
His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. The Cossacks (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl.
Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner, much like Tolstoy, who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.
More information: The Conversation
Tolstoy not only drew from his own life experiences but also created characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection.
Tolstoy's contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who died thirty years before Tolstoy, admired and was delighted by Tolstoy's novels and, conversely, Tolstoy also admired Dostoyevsky's work.
Gustave Flaubert, on reading a translation of War and Peace, exclaimed, What an artist and what a psychologist! Anton Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate, wrote, When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature.
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| Lev Tolstoy and his grandchildren |
The 19th-century British poet and critic Matthew Arnold opined that A novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life.
Later novelists continued to appreciate Tolstoy's art, but sometimes also expressed criticism. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote I am attracted by his earnestness and by his power of detail, but I am repelled by his looseness of construction and by his unreasonable and impracticable mysticism. Virginia Woolf declared him the greatest of all novelists; James Joyce noted that He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical! and Thomas Mann wrote of Tolstoy's seemingly guileless artistry: Seldom did art work so much like nature.
Vladimir Nabokov heaped superlatives upon The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina; he questioned, however, the reputation of War and Peace, and sharply criticized Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata.
After reading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Tolstoy gradually became converted to the ascetic morality upheld in that work as the proper spiritual path for the upper classes.
Tolstoy died in 1910, aged 82. Just before his death, his health was a concern of his family, who cared for him daily. In his last days, he spoke and wrote about dying. Renouncing his aristocratic lifestyle, he left home one winter night. His secretive departure was an apparent attempt to escape from his wife's tirades. She spoke out against many of his teachings, and in recent years had grown envious of his attention to Tolstoyan disciples.
Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo railway station, after a day's train journey south. The station master took Tolstoy to his apartment, and his personal doctors arrived and gave him injections of morphine and camphor.
The police tried to limit access to his funeral procession, but thousands of peasants lined the streets. Still, some were heard to say that, other than knowing that some nobleman had died, they knew little else about Tolstoy.
According to some sources, Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers on the train.
Art is not a handicraft,
it is the transmission of feeling
the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy
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