Book description
The artistic work of Leo Tolstoy has been described as 'nothing less
than one tremendous diary kept for over fifty years'. This particular
'diary' begins with Tolstoy's first published work,
Childhood
, which was written when he was only twenty-three. A
semi-autobiographical work, it recounts two days in the childhood of
ten-year-old Nikolai Irtenev, recreating vivid impressions of people,
place and events with the exuberant perspective of a child enriched by
the ironic retrospective understanding of an adult. Boyhood
and Youth
soon followed, and Tolstoy was launched on the literary career that
would bring him immortality.
Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on
the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, where he
spent most of his early years, together with his several brothers. In
1844 he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental Languages and
later Law, but left before completing a degree. He spent the following
years in a round of drinking, gambling and womanizing, until weary of
his idle existence he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in
1851.
He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sevastopol
wrote The Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6), which established his literary
reputation. After leaving the army in 1856 Tolstoy spent some time
mixing with the literati in St Petersburg before travelling abroad and
then settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the
running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. His
marriage to Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862 marked the beginning of a
period of contentment centred around family life; they had thirteen
children. Tolstoy managed his vast estates, continued his educational
projects, cared for his peasants and wrote both his great novels, War
and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877).
During the 1870s he underwent a spiritual crisis, the moral and
religious ideas that had always dogged him coming to the fore. A
Confession (1879-82) marked an outward change in his life and works;
he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and in a series of
pamphlets written after 1880 he rejected church and state, indicted
the demands of flesh, and denounced private property. His teachings
earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, and also led
finally to his excommunication by the Russian Holy Synod in 1901. In
1910 at the age of eighty-two he fled from home 'leaving this worldly
life in order to live out my last days in peace and solitude'; dying
some days later at the station master's house at Astapovo.
