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| Birth Name(s) : Lev Tolstoi |
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Full Lev Tolstoi Biography
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (September 9 1828 – November 20 1910) (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й, IPA: listen (help·info)), commonly referred to in English as Leo (Lyof, Lyoff) Tolstoy, was a Russian writer – novelist, essayist, dramatist and philosopher – as well as pacifist Christian anarchist and educational reformer. He was the most influential member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family.
In 1859 he started a school for peasant children at Yasnaya, followed by twelve others, whose ground-breaking libertarian principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay, "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". He also authored a great number of stories for peasant children. Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived, but as a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of libertarian education.
Following this conversion, the details of which are given below, Tolstoy's rationalism found satisfaction in the admirably constructed system of his doctrine. But the irrational Tolstoy remained alive beneath the hardened crust of crystallized dogma. Tolstoy's diaries reveal that the desires of the flesh were active in him until an unusually advanced age; and the desire for expansion, the desire that gave life to War and Peace, the desire for the fullness of life with all its pleasure and beauty, never died in him. We catch few glimpses of this in his writings, for he subjected them to a strict and narrow discipline. His magic touch did not suffer from his conversion, however. He wrote as effortlessly as ever and his late years produced admirable works of art, such as Hadji Murad, one of many pieces that appeared posthumously. It became increasingly apparent that, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there were only two subjects that Tolstoy was really interested in and thought worth writing about – and that is life and death. The relationship between life and death was examined by him over and over again, with increasing complexity, in the final version of Kholstomer, in War and Peace, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in How Much Land Does a Man Need? and in Master and Man.
Soon after A Confession became known, Tolstoy began, at first against his will, to recruit disciples. The first of these was Vladimir Chertkov, an ex-officer of the Horse Guards and founder of the Tolstoyans, described by D.S. Mirsky as a "narrow fanatic and a hard, despotic man, who exercised an enormous practical influence on Tolstoy and became a sort of grand vizier of the new community". Tolstoy also established contact with certain sects of Christian communists and anarchists, like the Dukhobors. Despite his unorthodox views and support for Thoreau's doctrine of civil disobedience, Tolstoy was unmolested by the government, solicitous to avoid negative publicity abroad. Only in 1901 did the Synod excommunicate him. This act, widely but rather unjudiciously resented both at home and abroad, merely registered a matter of common knowledge – that Tolstoy had ceased to be an Orthodox Church-man.
Tolstoy's fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. Matthew Arnold commented that Tolstoy's work is not art, but a piece of life. Arnold's assessment was echoed by Isaak Babel who said that, "if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy".
Tolstoy's contemporaries paid him lofty tributes: Fyodor Dostoyevsky thought him the greatest of all living writers and Gustave Flaubert, on reading War and Peace for the first time in translation, compared him to Shakespeare and gushed: "What an artist and what a psychologist!". Ivan Turgenev called Tolstoy a "great writer of the Russian land" and implored him not to abandon literature on his deathbed. 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."
In hundreds of essays over the last twenty years of his life, Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of the State and recommended books by Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, whilst rejecting anarchism's espousal of violent revolutionary means, writing in the 1900 essay, "On Anarchy":
The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power…There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
Leo Tolstoy in the media
- Leo Tolstoy at the Internet Movie Database
- ALEXANDER II AND HIS TIMES: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky |
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