Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his family's estate in the Tula region, into the Russian nobility. His parents died before he was ten; he was raised by relatives, studied briefly at Kazan University without graduating, and spent his early adult years in dissolute idleness before joining the army and serving in the Caucasus and in the Crimean War. His Sevastopol sketches, written under fire and published in 1855–56, established his name. He had no literary training; he distrusted literary culture for his entire life and was contemptuous of most writers, including, eventually, himself.

War and Peace (1869), written over six years, follows five aristocratic families through Napoleon's invasion of Russia. It is 1,225 pages in most translations and contains over 500 characters. It is not a novel in any conventional sense — Tolstoy himself dismissed the category — but a panorama of Russian life that moves between intimate psychological portraiture and the philosophy of history. Its central argument is against the great-man theory: Napoleon and Kutuzov alike are less the directors of events than their symbolic expressions; history is made by the aggregate actions of millions of ordinary people. Anna Karenina (1877), domestic in scale, is often cited as the most technically perfect long novel in any language: the parallel stories of Anna and Levin are structured with a precision that makes the structural choices feel inevitable. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), a novella, is the most concentrated expression of his moral philosophy: a bureaucrat confronts his own death and discovers that he has not lived.

In his fifties, Tolstoy underwent a religious crisis that he described in A Confession (1882). He emerged from it convinced that his earlier fiction was sinful vanity, that private property was theft, that the Orthodox Church was a corrupt institution, and that the Sermon on the Mount was a practical program for human life. He renounced copyright on works written after 1880, gave away much of his property, dressed as a peasant, worked in the fields, became a vegetarian, and advocated for the religious communities that were forming around his ideas (Tolstoyanism). The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1901. His influence on Gandhi's philosophy of non-violent resistance — they corresponded directly — is documented and direct.

In October 1910, at eighty-two, he left Yasnaya Polyana in secret in the middle of the night, unable to bear the contradictions between his life and his beliefs. He developed pneumonia and died eleven days later at the stationmaster's house in Astapovo, surrounded by journalists and family members he had instructed not to follow him.

Literary criticism has generally treated his fiction and his religious conversion as separate phenomena, evaluating one and bracketing the other. Tolstoy's own position was that they were continuous — that the fiction was preparation for the conversion and the conversion was the truth the fiction was reaching toward. Whether his later didactic writing (What Is Art?, The Kreutzer Sonata) sustains comparison with the earlier novels is a genuine critical question, and most readers find it does not. The canonical answer is that his genius and his zealotry coexisted imperfectly. That answer is probably correct, and it leaves his position secure: the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina needs no other credential.