Submitted by: Rijan Maharjan

Class: 11 (S10)
 Leo Tolstoy
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Лев

Николаевич Толстой) known as Leo Tolstoy, was a
Russian writer who is regarded to be one of the best
writer of all time. He was born on September 9,
1828 in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia. He was the
fourth son of the five children of Count Nikolai
Ilyich Tolstoy and Countess Mariya Tolstaya. His
mother died when he was two and his father when he
was nine. Tolstoy and his siblings were then brought
up by their aunt. When the aunt passed away,
Tolstoy and his siblings moved in with a second
aunt, in Kazan, Russia. Although Tolstoy
experiencing a lot loss at an early age, he would later
idealize his childhood memories in his writing.

Tolstoy received his primary education at home.

In 1843, he enrolled in an oriental languages
program at the University of Kazan where teachers
described him as “both unable and unwilling to learn”. Tolstoy ultimately left the University
of Kazan in 1847, without a degree. He returned to his Parent’s estate, where he made a go at
becoming a farmer. His stab at becoming the perfect farmer soon proves to be a failure. He
did, however, succeed in pouring his energies into keeping a journal – the beginning of
lifelong habit that would inspire much of his fiction.

Once Tolstoy was flailing on the farm, his older brother, Nikolay, came to visit while
on military leave. Nikolay convinced Tolstoy to join the Army as a Junker, south in the
Caucasus Mountains, where Nikolay Himself was stationed. Following his stint as a
Junker, Tolstoy transferred to Sevastopol in Ukraine in November 1854, where he fought
in the Crimean War through August 1855. During Quite periods, he worked on a story
called ‘childhood’, a fictitious account of his own. He was appalled by the number of deaths
involved in warfare and left the army after the end of the Crimean War.

His experience in the army converted Tolstoy from a dissolute and the privileged
society author to a non-violent and spiritual anarchist. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy
witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that marked the rest of his

“If you want to be happy, be.”

Life. Tolstoy’s political philosophy was influenced by a March 1861 visit to French
anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in
Brussels.

As a young man, Tolstoy lived dissolute lifestyle and gambled extensively,

particularly during his time as an army officer. In 1554 he was forced to dismantle and sell
for 5,000 roubles the main stately home on the estate inherited from his maternal grandfather
at Yasanaa Polyana. By 1855 he had gambled away the whole 5,000 roubles. He settled in a
more modest house on the estate and lived there for more than 50 years

The death of his brother Nikolay in 1860 had an

impact on Tolstoy, and led him to desire to marry. On
September 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna
Behrs, who was sixteen years junior and the daughter of a
court physician. The Behrs family had three daughters who
were close acquaintances of Tolstoy. Though the family
wanted him to marry the eldest, Lisa, Tolstoy was more
attracted to the middle daughter Sofia. Sofia records in her
diary that Tolstoy took some chalk and wrote the initial
letters of some words on a card table, and asked her to
guess the meaning. It was not just two or three letters such
as ‘M.M’ for ‘Marry me’, but well over a dozen! Sofia
claims that she understood at once. The scene is recreated
in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina when Levin Proposes
to Kitty for the second time.

Tolstoy and Sofia had 13 children, eight of whom

survived childhood. Even so, their early married life was
happy and allowed Tolstoy much freedom and the support system to compose ‘War and
Peace’ and ‘Anna Karenina’ with Sonya acting as his secretary, editor, and financial
manager. Sonya was copying and hand-writing his epic works time after time. Tolstoy would
continue editing War and Peace and had to have clean final drafts to be delivered to the
publisher. Sofia responsible for writing each version by hand (often using magnifying glass
decipher Tolstoy’s scribbling on every bit of space on the page, including the margins). Over
the next seven years, she rewrote the complete manuscript eight times (and some individual
sections nearly 30 times), all while giving birth to four of the couple’s 13 children and
managing their estate and business affairs.

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

 Despite the success of Anna Karenina, following the novel’s completion, Tolstoy
suffered a spiritual crisis and grew depresses. Struggling to uncover the meaning of life,
Tolstoy first went to the Russian Orthodox Church but did not find the answers he sought
there. He came to believe that Christian churches were corrupt and, in lieu of organised
religion, developed his own beliefs. He decided to express those beliefs by founding a new
publication called The Meditator in 1883.

As a consequence of espousing his unconventional – and therefore controversial –

spiritual beliefs, Tolstoy was ousted by the Russian Orthodox Church. He was even
watched by the secret police. When Tolstoy’s new beliefs prompted his desire to give away
his money, his wife strongly objected. The disagreement put a strain on the couple’s marriage
until Tolstoy begrudgingly agreed to compromise. He conceded to granting his wife the
copyrights – and presumably the royalties – to all of his writing predating 1881.

Some historians argue that Tolstoy’s essays on peace laid the foundations for modern
pacifism. After reading Tolstoy’s ‘The kingdom of God within You’, Gandhi was inspired
to pursue non-violent resistance, calling Tolstoy “the greatest apostle of non-violence that
the present age has produced”.

Tolstoy grew increasingly troubled by the privilege of his background and developed
an interest in his lifestyle and culture of the peasantry. This extended him to make his own
shoes in the traditional peasant way out of bast: thin strips of bark from the birch or linden
tree. He wasn’t very good at it but he wore them anyway.

Tolstoy in his novel Resurrection, he attempts to expose the injustice of man-made law and
the hypocrisy of institutionalized church. Tolstoy also explores ad explains the economic
philosophy of Georgism of which he had become a very strong advocate towards the end of
his life.

Tolstoy also tried himself in poetry with several soldier songs written during his
military service and fairy tales in verse such as Volga-bogatyr and Oaf stylized as national
folk songs. They were written between 1871 and 1874 for his Russian Book for Reading, a
collection of short stories in four volumes (total 629 stories in various genres) published
along with the New Azbuka textbook and addressed to schoolchildren. Nevertheless, he was
sceptical about poetry as a genre. As he famously said, “Writing poetry is like ploughing
and dancing at the same time”. According to Valentin Bulgakov, he criticised poets,
including Alexander Pushkin, for their “false” epithets used “simply to make it rhyme”.

“Love is life. All, everything I understand only because I love.”

 The novella, the death of Ivan Ilyich, shows the
influence of Realism on Tolstoy. The illusion of reality,
the main theme of the novella, is an aspect of Realism that
Tolstoy effectively used in this novella. Other attitudes of
Realism that were used by Tolstoy were the plainness of
the characters, aa plot that consisted of incidents of
everyday life, along with everyday language, and the ability
to make the reader feel as if he were looking in on events
happening in real life.

Tolstoy’s short story ‘God Sees the Truth, but

waits’ first published in 1872 is about the false conviction
and imprisonment of a man for a murder he did not
commit, and it takes the form of a parable for forgiveness.

Tolstoy received nominations for the novel Prize in

Literature every year from 1902 to 1906. That he never
won is a major controversy.

In 1910, Tolstoy already began to suffer through poor health. By the time of his old
age, Tolstoy was a cultural icon and had followers worldwide who tried to put his views into
practice. But her wife Sofia once wrote, “He was so inconsistent that no one in the world
could understand what he wanted”. Though his family was concerned, engaging in daily care
for him. He decided to leave his home in secret in the middle of the night, separating from his
wife. He fled the family home, sick of the years of bad relations with his wife. This was
during the middle of winter in Russia.

The pilgrimage proved too arduous for the ageing novelist. Tolstoy died at the age of
82 from pneumonia in 1910. He traveled south train just one day before he died of
pneumonia at Astapovo train station. There, Tolstoy was taken to the station master’s
apartment and doctors injected him with morphine and camphor. The train station was
later renamed in his honor in 1918 as Lva Tolstogo, and then in 1932 to Lev Tolstoy.

In his last days, he spoke and wrote about dying. According to some sources, Tolstoy
spent the last hours of his life preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow
passengers on the train. He was buried at his home estate; Yasnaya Polyana near Tula,
Russia where Tolstoy had lost so many loved ones yet had managed to build such fond and
lasting memories of his childhood. His estate operates today as a writer’s house museum
and his unadorned grave can be found in the park. Before he died, Tolstoy led a very rich
and interesting life.

The news of the dying celebrity drew huge crowds and cameras from pathe, making
his death an international news story. More than three thousand people lined the streets to
see his coffin carried back to Yasnaya Polyana. As Tolstoy had been excommunicated there
were no religious rites at his burial. Years before the Communists suppressed the Russian
Orthodox Church; his was the first civil funeral in Russia.
 The police tried to lit access to his funeral procession, but thousands of peasants
lined the streets. Still, somewhere heard to say that, other than knowing that “some nobleman
had died”’ they knew little else about Tolstoy.”