War and Peace (Voyna i mir) (1865–1869)
Epic of Russian aristocratic families during the Napoleonic Wars, mixed with essays on the philosophy of history
Literature · Novelists
Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910 · Russian
Realism; later Christian anarchism and pacifism
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, often ranked among the greatest novels ever written. After a spiritual crisis around 1880 he developed a radical, non-violent Christianity that rejected church and state authority, influencing Gandhi, and was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. He died at the railway station of Astapovo after fleeing his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana.
How to spot them
- ▸War and Peace: Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Natasha Rostova, Borodino and Napoleon's 1812 invasion
- ▸Anna Karenina: Vronsky, Levin, Kitty; 'All happy families are alike...'
- ▸Yasnaya Polyana, his estate near Tula; died at Astapovo railway station (1910)
- ▸The Kingdom of God Is Within You inspired Gandhi's non-violence; Tolstoy Farm in South Africa
- ▸Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox
Key works
Anna Karenina (1875–1877 (serialised); 1878 (book))
A married woman's doomed affair with Count Vronsky, set against Levin's search for meaning; she dies under a train
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
Novella of a judge confronting a meaningless life as he dies
The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
Novella of a jealous husband who kills his wife; named after Beethoven's violin sonata and censored in Russia
Resurrection (Voskreseniye) (1899)
His last novel; proceeds helped the persecuted Doukhobor sect emigrate to Canada
Sevastopol Sketches (1855)
Stories drawn from his service in the Crimean War siege of Sevastopol
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894)
Treatise on non-resistance to evil that deeply influenced Gandhi
Hadji Murat (1912 (posthumous))
Novella about an Avar commander in the Caucasian War
Key ideas
- History is driven by countless individual actions, not by 'great men' such as Napoleon (War and Peace)
- Non-resistance to evil by force, based on the Sermon on the Mount; rejection of state violence, property and church dogma
- What Is Art? (1897) argued that art should communicate feeling and unite people morally
- Admirers who adopted his ideas were called Tolstoyans
Quick-fire facts
- •Born at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, into a noble family; he held the title of count
- •Served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, including at Sevastopol
- •Married Sofia (Sophia) Behrs in 1862; they had thirteen children, and she copied out his manuscripts
- •Anna Karenina opens: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'
- •Excommunicated by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901
- •Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and for the Peace Prize but never won
- •Left home secretly in November 1910 at the age of 82 and died of pneumonia at Astapovo station
- •Corresponded with the young Gandhi, who named his South African commune Tolstoy Farm (1910)
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Sources
- Rosamund Bartlett — Tolstoy: A Russian Life
- Isaiah Berlin — The Hedgehog and the Fox