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Leo Tolstoy
Table of Contents
 * Introduction & Top Questions
   
 * 
   Early years
   
 * 
   First publications
   
 * The period of the great novels (1863–77)
    * War and Peace
   
    * Anna Karenina

 * 
   Conversion and religious beliefs
   
 * 
   Fiction after 1880
   
 * 
   Last years
   
 * 
   Legacy
   

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 * Quotes
 * Facts & Related Content

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Home Literature Novels & Short Stories Novelists L-Z


LEO TOLSTOY

Russian writer
Alternate titles: Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoi
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By Gary Saul Morson • Edit History

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Leo Tolstoy
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Born: September 9, 1828 Yasnaya Polyana Russia ...(Show more) Died: November 20,
1910 (aged 82) Russia ...(Show more) Notable Works: “An Examination of Dogmatic
Theology” “Anna Karenina” “Boyhood” “Childhood” “Father Sergius” “Hadji-Murad”
“Kholstomer” “My Confession” “Resurrection” “Sevastopol in August” “Sevastopol
in December” “Sevastopol in May” “The Cossacks” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” “The
Kingdom of God Is Within You” “The Kreutzer Sonata” “The Living Corpse” “The
Power of Darkness” “The Raid” “Three Deaths” “Union and Translation of the Four
Gospels” “War and Peace” “What I Believe” “What Is Art?” “Yasnaya Polyana”
“Youth” ...(Show more) Movement / Style: realism ...(Show more)
See all related content →
Top Questions
WHY IS LEO TOLSTOY SIGNIFICANT?

Russian author Leo Tolstoy is considered a master of realistic fiction and one
of the world’s greatest novelists, especially known for Anna Karenina and War
and Peace. Oscillating between skepticism and dogmatism, he explored the most
diverse approaches to human experience. His works have been praised as pieces of
life, not pieces of art.

WHAT WAS LEO TOLSTOY’S CHILDHOOD LIKE?

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828, the scion of aristocrats. His mother died before
he was two years old, and his father passed away in 1837. After two other
guardians died, Tolstoy lived with an aunt in Kazan, Russia. According to
Tolstoy, his cousin Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya had the greatest influence
on his childhood.

HOW DID LEO TOLSTOY DIE?

Upset by an unhappy marriage and by the contradiction between his life and his
principles, Leo Tolstoy left his family’s estate in 1910. Despite his stealth,
the press began reporting on his movements. He soon contracted pneumonia and
died of heart failure at a railroad station in Astapovo, Russia. He was 82.

WHAT ARE LEO TOLSTOY’S ACHIEVEMENTS?

Leo Tolstoy is known primarily for having written the masterpieces War and Peace
(1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the
finest novels ever written. Exemplars of realistic fiction, they vividly embody
a vision of human experience rooted in an appreciation of everyday life and
prosaic virtues.



Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy also spelled Tolstoi, Russian in full Lev Nikolayevich,
Graf (count) Tolstoy, (born August 28 [September 9, New Style], 1828, Yasnaya
Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire—died November 7 [November 20], 1910,
Astapovo, Ryazan province), Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and
one of the world’s greatest novelists.

Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and
Anna Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels
ever written. War and Peace in particular seems virtually to define this form
for many readers and critics. Among Tolstoy’s shorter works, The Death of Ivan
Ilyich (1886) is usually classed among the best examples of the novella.
Especially during his last three decades Tolstoy also achieved world renown as a
moral and religious teacher. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil had an
important influence on Gandhi. Although Tolstoy’s religious ideas no longer
command the respect they once did, interest in his life and personality has, if
anything, increased over the years.



Most readers will agree with the assessment of the 19th-century British poet and
critic Matthew Arnold that a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece
of life; the Russian author Isaak Babel commented that, if the world could write
by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Critics of diverse schools have agreed
that somehow Tolstoy’s works seem to elude all artifice. Most have stressed his
ability to observe the smallest changes of consciousness and to record the
slightest movements of the body. What another novelist would describe as a
single act of consciousness, Tolstoy convincingly breaks down into a series of
infinitesimally small steps. According to the English writer Virginia Woolf, who
took for granted that Tolstoy was “the greatest of all novelists,” these
observational powers elicited a kind of fear in readers, who “wish to escape
from the gaze which Tolstoy fixes on us.” Those who visited Tolstoy as an old
man also reported feelings of great discomfort when he appeared to understand
their unspoken thoughts. It was commonplace to describe him as godlike in his
powers and titanic in his struggles to escape the limitations of the human
condition. Some viewed Tolstoy as the embodiment of nature and pure vitality,
others saw him as the incarnation of the world’s conscience, but for almost all
who knew him or read his works, he was not just one of the greatest writers who
ever lived but a living symbol of the search for life’s meaning.




EARLY YEARS

The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy was born at the family estate, about
130 miles (210 kilometres) south of Moscow, where he was to live the better part
of his life and write his most-important works. His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna,
née Princess Volkonskaya, died before he was two years old, and his father
Nikolay Ilich, Graf (count) Tolstoy, followed her in 1837. His grandmother died
11 months later, and then his next guardian, his aunt Aleksandra, in 1841.
Tolstoy and his four siblings were then transferred to the care of another aunt
in Kazan, in western Russia. Tolstoy remembered a cousin who lived at Yasnaya
Polyana, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya (“Aunt Toinette,” as he called her),
as the greatest influence on his childhood, and later, as a young man, Tolstoy
wrote some of his most-touching letters to her. Despite the constant presence of
death, Tolstoy remembered his childhood in idyllic terms. His first published
work, Detstvo (1852; Childhood), was a fictionalized and nostalgic account of
his early years.


Yasnaya Polyana: estate of Leo Tolstoy
Estate of Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, Russia.
© Dmitry Naumov/Shutterstock.com


Educated at home by tutors, Tolstoy enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1844
as a student of Oriental languages. His poor record soon forced him to transfer
to the less-demanding law faculty, where he wrote a comparison of the French
political philosopher Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws and Catherine the Great’s
nakaz (instructions for a law code). Interested in literature and ethics, he was
drawn to the works of the English novelists Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens
and, especially, to the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau; in place of a cross, he wore a medallion with a portrait of Rousseau.
But he spent most of his time trying to be comme il faut (socially correct),
drinking, gambling, and engaging in debauchery. After leaving the university in
1847 without a degree, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana, where he planned to
educate himself, to manage his estate, and to improve the lot of his serfs.
Despite frequent resolutions to change his ways, he continued his loose life
during stays in Tula, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. In 1851 he joined his older
brother Nikolay, an army officer, in the Caucasus and then entered the army
himself. He took part in campaigns against the native peoples and, soon after,
in the Crimean War (1853–56).

In 1847 Tolstoy began keeping a diary, which became his laboratory for
experiments in self-analysis and, later, for his fiction. With some
interruptions, Tolstoy kept his diaries throughout his life, and he is therefore
one of the most copiously documented writers who ever lived. Reflecting the life
he was leading, his first diary begins by confiding that he may have contracted
a venereal disease. The early diaries record a fascination with rule-making, as
Tolstoy composed rules for diverse aspects of social and moral behaviour. They
also record the writer’s repeated failure to honour these rules, his attempts to
formulate new ones designed to ensure obedience to old ones, and his frequent
acts of self-castigation. Tolstoy’s later belief that life is too complex and
disordered ever to conform to rules or philosophical systems perhaps derives
from these futile attempts at self-regulation.




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Please select which sections you would like to print:
 * Table Of Contents
 * Introduction & Top Questions
 * Early years
 * First publications
 * The period of the great novels (1863–77)
 * Conversion and religious beliefs
 * Fiction after 1880
 * Last years
 * Legacy
 * 2-Min Summary
 * Quotes
 * Facts & Related Content
 * Images
 * More Articles On This Topic
 * Additional Reading
 * Contributors
 * Article History

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