Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy {{Audio|Ru-Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.ogg|listen}} (Russian: ??? ??????????? ????????; commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy) (September 9, 1828 – November 20, 1910; August 28, 1828 – November 7, 1910, O.S.) was a Russian novelist, social reformer, pacifist, Christian anarchist, vegetarian, moral thinker and an influential member of the Tolstoy family.

Novels and Fictional Works

Tolstoy was one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and many shorter works, including the novellas The Death of Ivan Ilych and Hadji Murad.

Related Topics:
19th century - Russian literature - War and Peace - Anna Karenina - Novellas - The Death of Ivan Ilych - Hadji Murad

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His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes: Dostoevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists while Gustave Flaubert gushed: "What an artist and what a psychologist!". Later critics and novelists would concede. Virginia Woolf went on to declare him "greatest of all novelists" and Thomas Mann wrote of his seemingly guileless artistry: "Seldom did art work so much like nature", sentiments shared in part by many others, including Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and William Faulkner.

Related Topics:
Dostoevsky - Gustave Flaubert - Virginia Woolf - Thomas Mann - Marcel Proust - Vladimir Nabokov - William Faulkner

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His autobiographical novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), his first publications, tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the differences between him and his peasant playmates. Although in later life Tolstoy rejected these books as sentimental, a great deal of his own life is revealed, and the books still have relevance for their telling of the universal story of growing up.

Related Topics:
Autobiographical novels - Peasant

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Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastapol Sketches. His experiences in battle helped develop his pacifism, and gave him material for realistic depiction of the horrors of war in his later work.

Related Topics:
Second lieutenant - Crimean War - Sevastapol Sketches - Pacifism - War

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His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. The Cossacks (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside his serfs in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.

Related Topics:
Fiction - The Cossacks - Cossack - Serf

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Tolstoy not only drew from his experience of life but created characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection.

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War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. It was written with the purpose of exploring Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. War and Peace (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that Anna Karenina was his first true novel, and it is indeed one of the greatest of all realist novels.

Related Topics:
Novel - Napoleon - Alexander I of Russia - Austerlitz - Borodino - Realist - Epic

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After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and What Then Must We Do? develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Orthodox church in 1901.

Related Topics:
Christian - Anarcho - Pacifist - Philosophy - Excommunication - Orthodox church

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