Tolstoy, Leo Nikolaievich (1828–1910)

Russian novelist. He wrote War and Peace (1863–69) and Anna Karenina (1873–77). He was offended by the materialism of Western Europe and in the 1860s and 1870s he became a pioneer of ‘free education’. From 1880 he underwent a profound spiritual crisis and took up various moral positions, including passive resistance to evil, rejection of authority (religious or civil) and private ownership, and a return to basic mystical Christianity. He was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, and his later works were banned.

Tolstoy was born to a noble family at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, but was orphaned at the age of nine. He studied at Kazan University, but left before graduating. In 1851 he joined the Russian forces in the Caucasus, and fought in the Crimean War, taking part as an artillery officer in the defence of Sevastopol. While in the Caucasus he wrote the autobiographical Childhood and Boyhood. He arrived in St Petersburg in 1855, and was received with admiration in the literary circles of the capital as a new star of Russian letters. During the next two years he published Tales from Sevastopol, which exposed and cut down romantic ideas of martial bravery, and Youth.

In 1857 and 1860 he travelled widely in Western Europe, feeling disgust at its materialism, and in the 1860s and 1870s he devoted much of his time and energy to educational activities, running a school on his estate, publishing a special magazine, and writing textbooks, as one of the pioneers of ‘free education’. The 1860s and 1870s were also the period of his most intensive literary work, producing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. By the time he finished the latter Tolstoy had approached a spiritual crisis, which in the following years was resolved by his working out a new religious and social teaching based on renunciation of violence, wealth, and sex, a need for inner self-improvement, and love for all living things. The fame of his teaching soon spread beyond Russia, and Yasnaya Polyana became a place of pilgrimage. However, Tolstoy himself felt increasingly estranged from it and from his family, who did not share his views. Unable to reconcile his ideal of simple life with the atmosphere of his family estate, he secretly left Yasnaya Polyana and died ten days later.

His first published work was Childhood (1852), the first part of the trilogy that was completed with Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857). Tales from Sevastopol was published in 1856; later books illustrating and circulating the personal philosophy he developed after his crisis include What I Believe (1883), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and the novel Resurrection (1900). His desire to give up his property and live as a peasant displeased his family and he finally fled his home and died of pneumonia at the railway station in Astapovo. As a writer he has had considerable influence on subsequent literature, but as a thinker he has proved much less influential, however his great disciple in his philosophy of nonresistance to evil was Mahatma Gandhi. His writings on his personal ethical code include What I Believe, A Confession (1884), and What Are We To Do? (1886).

In What is Art? (1896) Tolstoy argued that art should be simple and universally comprehensible, as well as morally uplifting, and rejected the ‘superfluous detail’ of his great realistic creations. The imaginative works of his later years, the long stories The Death of Ivan Ilich (1884), The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man (1895), and Hadji-Murad (1896–1904); the novel Resurrection; the plays The Power of Darkness (1886), The Fruits of Enlightenment (1890), and The Living Corpse (1900); and many popular stories, all to a greater or lesser extent serve to illustrate and propagate his new philosophy. His rejection of Church and State brought him excommunication and government hostility.