COMPLETE PROJECT ON LEO TOLSTOY
Synopsis
On September 9, 1828, Leo Tolstoy was born in Tula
Province, Russia. In the 1860s, he wrote his first great novel, War and
Peace. In 1873, Tolstoy set to work on the second of his best known novels, Anna
Karenina. He continued to write fiction throughout the 1880s and 1890s. One
of his most successful later works was The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Tolstoy died on November 20, 1910 in Astapovo, Russia.
On September 9, 1828, writer Leo Tolstoy was born
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 partying 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. Anna Karenina was partially based on current
events while Russia was at war with Turkey. Like War and Peace, it
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. The royalties that Tolstoy earned from the novel
contributed to his rapidly growing wealth.
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. (The
couple had spawned 13 children in all, but only 10 had survived past infancy.)
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.
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