Leo Tolstoy

• 1. Introduction

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  Leo Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life on a train, preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers, before pneumonia stopped him at a small railway station. He was born Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1828, into old Russian nobility, and he died in 1910. Between those years he wrote War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, three works often cited among the greatest novels ever written. Virginia Woolf called him the greatest of all novelists.

  Yet the man who built that reputation came to reject his own masterpieces as elitist counterfeit art. He renounced the copyrights on his earlier works and tried to give away the wealth he had inherited and earned. How does a privileged society author become a Christian anarchist who declares he will never serve any government anywhere? Why was a writer nominated for the Nobel Prize five years running never given one? And what made a Russian count moved to tears reading his own pages aloud to Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov? The answers run through war, marriage, faith, and a slaughterhouse in Tula.

• 2. From Officer To Anarchist

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  In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. He served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War and lived through the 11-month siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55, including the Battle of the Chernaya. He was recognized for his courage and promoted to lieutenant. He was also appalled by the number of deaths warfare demanded, and he left the army once the war ended.

  During a visit to Paris in 1857, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution, a trauma that marked the rest of his life. In a letter to his friend Vasily Botkin he wrote that the State was a conspiracy designed not only to exploit but above all to corrupt its citizens, vowing he would never serve any government anywhere. Two trips around Europe, in 1857 and 1860-61, converted him from a dissolute society author into a non-violent and spiritual anarchist. Others who walked the same road included Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin.

  The 1860-61 journey shaped him as both a thinker and a novelist. He met Victor Hugo and read Hugo's newly finished Les Misérables, whose battle scenes echo in War and Peace. In March 1861 he visited the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels. Proudhon had a forthcoming book titled La Guerre et la Paix, and Tolstoy later borrowed the title for his masterpiece. He recorded that Proudhon was the only man who understood the significance of education and the printing press in their time.

• 3. The School At Yasnaya Polyana

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  Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded 13 schools for the children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. He set out the schools' principles in an 1862 essay, The School at Yasnaya Polyana. The Tsarist secret police harassed the project, and his educational experiments were short-lived.

  Despite that, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can claim to be the first coherent theory of democratic education, a direct forerunner to A.S. Neill's Summerhill School. The estate itself sat 12 km southwest of Tula and 200 km south of Moscow, the place where Tolstoy had been born as the fourth of five children. His mother, Princess Mariya, died when he was two, and his father, a veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812, died when he was nine. Relatives raised the orphaned siblings, and in 1844 he entered Kazan University to study law and oriental languages, where teachers judged him both unable and unwilling to learn.

• 4. Sonya And The Manuscripts

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  On the 23rd of September 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, sixteen years his junior and the daughter of a court physician. On the eve of the wedding he handed her his diaries, which detailed his sexual past and the fact that one of the serfs on his estate had borne him a son. They went on to have 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood.

  Sonya, as her family called her, became far more than a wife. She acted as his secretary, editor, and financial manager, copying and hand-writing his epic works time after time so clean final drafts could reach the publisher. That support system gave him the freedom to compose War and Peace and Anna Karenina. While finishing the last installments of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy fell into such anguish that he began putting away guns and ropes, afraid he would kill himself.

  A.N. Wilson described their later years together as one of the unhappiest in literary history. The marriage deteriorated as Tolstoy's beliefs grew more radical and he sought to reject his inherited and earned wealth. Some of his descendants later scattered after the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, settling in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. His last surviving grandchild, Countess Tatiana Tolstoy-Paus, died in 2007 at Herresta manor in Sweden.

• 5. The Realist's Canvas

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  War and Peace contains 580 characters, some historical and many fictional, moving from family parlors to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. Tolstoy's original idea was to investigate the causes of the Decembrist revolt, which the book reaches only in its final chapters. Through it he argued for the insignificance of individuals like Napoleon and Alexander against the larger forces of history.

  Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace a novel at all, viewing the novel as a framework for examining social and political questions of nineteenth-century life. He reserved that label for Anna Karenina, which he called his first novel, telling the parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by social convention and a philosophical landowner who works the fields beside the peasants. He poured himself into his characters, among them Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei, Levin in Anna Karenina, and Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection.

  His admirers spoke in superlatives. Gustave Flaubert, reading a translation of War and Peace, exclaimed about the artist and psychologist before him. Anton Chekhov, who often visited the country estate, wrote that when literature possesses a Tolstoy it is easy and pleasant to be a writer. Isaac Babel said that if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Harold Bloom called Hadji Murad the best story in the world, and asked for the three greatest novels, William Faulkner answered Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, and Anna Karenina.

• 6. The Sermon On The Mount

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  In the 1870s Tolstoy suffered a profound moral crisis followed by what he regarded as a spiritual awakening, which he set down in his 1882 work Confession. His literal reading of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centered on the Sermon on the Mount and the injunction to turn the other cheek, turned him into a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. In 1884 he wrote What I Believe, openly confessing those beliefs, and he came to see the Church's doctrine as a perversion of Christ's teachings.

  Reading Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Tolstoy was converted to its ascetic morality, writing in 1869 of constant raptures over Schopenhauer and spiritual delights he had never known. In Chapter VI of Confession he quoted Schopenhauer's final paragraph, struck by its account of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu renunciation as the path to holiness. The Russian nobleman chose poverty and a formal denial of the will.

  He opposed private land ownership and the institution of marriage, valuing chastity and sexual abstinence, themes that surface in Father Sergius and the preface to The Kreutzer Sonata. Maxim Gorky recalled Tolstoy reading the temptation of Sergius aloud before him and Chekhov, moved to tears by the end. His critique of the Church and his anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.

• 7. A Letter To A Hindu

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  In 1908 Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, arguing for non-violence as the means for India to gain independence from colonial rule. The following year Gandhi, becoming an activist in South Africa, read a copy and wrote seeking proof that Tolstoy was its author. Their correspondence lasted only a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but it led Gandhi to name his second ashram in South Africa the Tolstoy Colony.

  The Kingdom of God Is Within You, published in 1894, carried his doctrine of nonresistance to evil by force. Its reach extended to Mahatma Gandhi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Bevel. Gandhi acknowledged the debt in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced. Gandhi's word satyagraha drew on a conception of truth as universal love that traced back to Tolstoy's reading of Christianity rather than to Hindu tradition.

  Tolstoy turned his pacifism outward at the world's conflicts. He denounced the Eight-Nation Alliance intervention in the Boxer Rebellion, the Filipino-American War, and the Second Boer War, naming Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II as most responsible for the atrocities. The Boxer Rebellion drew him toward Chinese philosophy; a famous sinophile, he read Confucius and Laozi and corresponded with the intellectual Gu Hongming. He championed the persecuted Doukhobors, helping them migrate to Canada after they burned their weapons in peaceful protest in 1895, and he became a major supporter of the Esperanto movement.

• 8. The Slaughterhouse And The Soviet Shelf

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  Tolstoy first became interested in vegetarianism in 1882, though his conversion was long and gradual, and only from 1890 did he adopt a strict meatless diet he is said never to have consciously betrayed. He associated such a diet with high moral views on life, calling the eating of meat simply immoral because it requires killing. In an 1893 essay, The First Step, he described a cruel scene he had witnessed at a slaughterhouse in Tula, which confirmed his belief that meat had no place in the diet.

  His father had introduced him to hunting, and he became a passionate huntsman who shot duck, quail, snipe, woodcock, and otters. His diary for the 23rd of March 1852 records marvellous weather, a ride through undulating country, and two ducks killed. He hunted for decades before stopping in the 1880s, and in 1890 he wrote a preface for Vladimir Chertkov's anti-hunting pamphlet, though he never gave up his love of horse-riding.

  The state he despised made him its best-selling author. More than 400 million copies of his works were printed in the Soviet Union, and in 1928 the State Publishing House agreed to a 92-volume collection. His youngest child, Alexandra, named heir to his works, met with Stalin in June 1928 over the funds she felt were lacking. A famous lost film survives only as a story: in 1901 the travel lecturer Burton Holmes filmed Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana with a 60-mm camera, but the footage was destroyed by advisers who feared the meeting might hurt a U.S. senator's chances of running for president.