Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy

On September 9, 1928, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana estate, fourth child to Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy and Maria Nikolaevna (born Volkonskaya).

Tolstoy belonged to one of Russia's most ancient noble families. On the Tolstoy side, the family rose to prominence under Tsar Alexei I, due to a fortuitous marriage with the Miloslavsky clan (in-laws of the tsar). Five generations back, Count Pyotr Tolstoy (despite taking part in the streltsy rebellion against Peter I) became a close comrade in arms of Peter the Great. It was about him that Peter once quipped, “Head, oh head, were you not so wise, I would have ordered you chopped off long ago.” Lev Tolstoy’s grandfather on his motherÕs side, Nikolai Volkonsky, was a general under Catherine the Great. Volkonsky retired during the reign of Paul I and began renovating Yasnaya Polyana. TolstoyÕs father participated in the war of 1812 against the French and retired with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

After Tolstoy's father married Maria Volkonskaya, the Tolstoys settled at Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy’s mother died when he was just two, and his father died suddenly when Tolstoy was a boy of nine. He was subsequently raised in Moscow and at Yasnaya Polyana by a distant relative, Tatyana Ergolskaya and under the guardianship of his aunt, Aleksandra Osten-Saken. When his aunt died in 1841, the family moved from Moscow to Kazan to live with another aunt.

In 1844, Tolstoy entered Kazan University, first in the faculty of Oriental languages, later in the legal faculty. He is not an very serious student and lives the wild life of a student nobleman. In 1847 he left the university and began a self-directed reading and study program that he felt would get him into the the law faculting at St. Petersburg University. He failed to take this to completion and piled up huge gambling debts. He then returned to Yasnaya Polyana where, among other things, he established a school to educate peasantry on the estate and begins to pursue and interest in education, but spends much time partying in Moscow and Tula. In 1851, his brother Nikolai, an officer serving in the Caucasus, came to visit him, as a result of which Lev accompanied him back to the south, where Tolstoy first was a volunteer in the fight against local rebels, and later an artillery officer.

Tolstoy’s literary career began in 1852, upon publication of his highly-autobiographical piece of fiction, Childhood. He was immediately recognized as a shining new talent, evoking a new realism in literature by vividly portraying the psychology and internal universe of a child (Turgenev said, “When this wine is mature, it will be a drink fit for the gods.”). There soon followed a second short work, Boyhood, some highly acclaimed short stories, and a fictional documentary of the war he was fighting, Sevastopol Stories. A searingly realistic tale told from the point of view of those fighting the battles, it was an unparalleled indictment of the atrocities of war. Through them, Tolstoy sought to show the extraordinary heroism of the average soldier. Yet his theme that “the truth is the only hero” would become a guiding principle in his future literary pursuits. Tolstoy served in the army until 1855 and took part in the brave defense of Sevastopol.

After his military service, Tolstoy went to St. Petersburg. He was there lionized by society and befriended by the writers behind the progressive literary journal Sovremennik (which had published his work), Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. He led the life of a typical nobleman of the 19th century, steeped in parties, affairs, drinking and gambling (indeed, as a result of one night’s gambling, he lost the main house at Yasnaya Polyana). He continued to write shorter works and traveled to Europe twice, but returned unimpressed. Tolstoy also soon tired of the society life and returned to play the role of country squire at Yasnaya Polyana, which he had inherited.

In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofia Andreyevna Behrs and started work on War and Peace, which took him six years to write, with Sofia acting as editor, transcriber and support. War and Peace stretched the boundaries of the modern novel. In it, Tolstoy brought to perfection his talents at writing realism, in viewing sweeping, historical events through the lives of individuals. Fully drained by the experience of writing the novel, Tolstoy in 1869 had a revelatory personal experience while traveling through Arzamas, one that he was loath to describe in later life, except to call it “the Arzamas horror.”

This may be why Tolstoy’s next great novel, Anna Karenina (1878), while a finer piece of literature, has less of the optimistic tone of War and Peace, and is more brooding and even cynical. For after Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s work changed. There were no more epic novels, just short stories and philosophical works.

Tolstoy’s polemical and autobiographical Confession (1882) was written against the backdrop of an increasingly bitter relationship with his wife and a growing preoccupation with religion. In it, Tolstoy explained why he turned his back on the educated rational intellectualism that was en vogue, and embraced a spiritual, anti-materialist philosophy based mainly on the Christian Gospel and the guidance of conscience. He became vegetarian, anti-clerical and pacifist, took strong stands against capital punishment and locked horns with the Emperor himself -- this found him many followers, who flocked to his estate and dubbed themselves Tostoyans. In 1901 he was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church for heresy--he had dared to argue that the church’s ceremony and priesthood were wrong.

If Confession was to provide the moral foundation for Tolstoy’s later work, What is Art? (1897) shaped his artistic pursuit. Tolstoy debunked “classics” of literature like Shakespeare and Pushkin, arguing that true art has to be fully accessible to all people, that is must be simple. Most important, however, it had to be judged by how well it “infected” those experiencing it with good, moral feelings. “The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art,” he wrote.

Among Tolstoy’s later works, Hadzhi Murat (1904), The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Master and Man (1895) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) stand out. While all include the didactic moralism that more or less infuses all his works, the art masterfully cloaks the preaching -- all are widely considered fine works of literature. He also wrote some powerful plays at this time, including The Power of Darkness (1886) and The Fruits of Enlightenment (1890), both of which are still staged today. In 1898 he hastily put to print his last novel, Resurrection, to help finance the relocation to Canada of a persecuted religious sect, the Dukhobors.

In the last decade of his life, Tolstoy devoted himself largely to work on his Circle of Reading (a compilation of daily meditations on moral issues), a compilation of the Gospels, and some lesser known works of fiction. But his personal relationship with his wife (see Reading List) made his life at Yasnaya Polyana unbearable. On the night of 28 October 1910, he decided to leave the estate and live out the rest of his life according to the simple life he preached but had never lived. He did not get far, due to his celebrity and, at 82, his ill-health. He died on November 7, in the home of a railway station attendant in Astapovo.

Opposed to private ownership, Tolstoy bequeathed part of his thousand hectare estate to local peasants. His youngest daughter Alexandra did the same and later ended up in America, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation in New York, which has built up an impressive record helping refugees, particularly from the former USSR.  Sofia Andreyevna continued to live  at Yasnaya Polyana and opened his office and his bedroom as a museum. Since 1994, the museum (now 412 hectares) has been headed by Count Vladimir Tolstoy, grandson?? of Lev Tolstoy.