Tolstoy: An Examined Life

Associate Professor Shannon Gramse

Opportunities for Lifelong Education (OLÉ!)University of Alaska AnchorageSeptember - October, 2016

“Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith suggested to me a great, a stupendous idea to the realization of which I feel capable of dedicating my whole life. This is the idea—the founding of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind: the religion of Christ, but purged of all dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but realizing bliss on earth. I understand that to bring this idea to fulfillment the conscientious labor of generations towards this end will be necessary.”

-Leo Tolstoy, Diary (1855)

“And just as I believed then, that there is a little green stick, on which is written the secret that will destroy all evil in people, and give them great blessings, so now I believe that such a truth exists and that it will be revealed to people and will give them what it promises.”

--Leo Tolstoy, Recollections (1902)

Yasnaya Polyana

YasnayaPolyana(“clear glade”),4,000 acres,120 miles south of Moscow

Ilya Repin painting of Tolstoy plowing at Yasnaya Polyana, 1889

Tolstoy’s grave at Yasnaya Polyana

Tolstoy Chronology

1828 Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy born August 28 at Yasnaya Polyana, youngest of four brothers

1830 Death of his mother shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Maria

1836 Death of his father from stroke

1841 Death of Tolstoy children’s guardian—an aunt

1842 Starts to read Rousseau

1844 Enters Kazan University

1847 Inherits Yasnaya Polyana, leaves Kazan University, begins social reforms for Yasnaya Polyana’s peasants

1848 Moves to Moscow, struggles with alcohol, gambling, venereal disease

1849 First serious attempts at writing, volunteers for the army, goes to Chechnya

1848: Man about Moscow, hedonist, addict…

1852 Childhood published, first of planned four-part semiautobiographical work, Four Periods Growth, author identified only as L.N.

1853 Fighting in the Caucasus, writes Boyhood and stories of army life, censored version of “The Raid” attracts popular and critical acclaim

1854 Promoted to ensign, transferred to Crimean War, fights with artillery brigade

1856 Death of brother Dimitri, steady output of successful short fiction under full name (“Sevastapol Sketches,” “The Wood-Felling,” “The Snow Storm,” etc., resigns army and returns to Yasnaya Polyana

1857 Visits France and Switzerland, studies European education

1859 Opens school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana

1860 Death of brother Nikolai (like Levin’s brother Nikolai in Anna Karenina)

1862 Marries Sophia Andreyevna, creates educational journal called YasnayaPolyana, first police raid on house

1863 First of 13 children is born, publishes The Cossacks (“part four” of Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth)

1854: Newly promoted officer headed to Crimean War

1855: “Valley of the Shadow of Death” by Robert Fenton

1862: Marries Sophia Andreyevna

1863-1869 War and Peace

• Written “under the best conditions of life”• 1200 pages, four volumes plus two epilogues and an appendix• Published serially in magazines, 1865-1869, hugely popular• Genre-buster: “What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even

less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.” (1886: “Some Words about War and Peace”)

• Epic scope, cast of thousands, mixes fictional and historical characters, a “loose baggy monster” (Henry James) built around complex juxtapositions

• Focuses on Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia and intersecting fates of the aristocratic Bezukhov, Bolkonsky, and Rostov families

• Illustrates life’s “labyrinth of linkages,” the deep interconnectedness of everyone and everything, with all its beauty, tragedy, spiritual import

• Rich with ideas about history, which is shaped less by “great men” than by countless small actors

• Pierre Bezukhov (“Peter Earless”) is primary Tolstoy semiautobiographical stand-in

1872 Publishes ABC primer and Tales for Children, including “God Sees the Truth, But Waits.”

1873-1877 Anna Karenina

• Deepening spiritual concerns and interests in education delayed novel’s production: “I cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary ones.”

• Over 800 pages, eight parts, also published serially, also enormously popular

• Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first novel• Like War and Peace, A.K. also distinguished by incredible

detail and psychological realism (though focused here on family intimacies, morality, and metaphysics—as set againstcontemporary Russian social and political issues of the 1870s)

• Essentially the story of two contrasting, interwoven marriages, one successful and the other tragic

• Epigram: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” (Romans 12:19)• Famous opening line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in

its own way.” • Konstantin Levin is primary Tolstoy (semi)autobiographical stand-in• Levin’s spiritual quest and ultimate epiphany clearly foreshadows Confession:

“Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live, Levin would say to himself…”

1879 Begins writing Confession

1881 Publishes “What Men Live By” in children’s journal, first fiction since Anna Karenina

1882 Confession banned in Russia (Published 1884 in Switzerland and not until 1906 in Russia), police spying intensifies, participates in Moscow census, increasing concern for urban poverty

1883 Writes What I Believe, also banned

1885 Gives up alcohol, tobacco, meat, hunting, writes many “stories for the people,” studies shoemaking, Eastern philosophy

1886 Publishes The Death of Ivan Ilych and “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, denounced as heretic, son Alexis dies at 4 ½

1889 Resurrection published, third and final full-length novel

1891 Renounces copyright and private property, tries to give Yasnaya Polyana to peasants over family objections, engages in famine relief work

1890s Publishes The Kingdom of God is Within You and many other religious and socio-political texts, becomes international celebrity, inspires “Tolstoyans”

1895: At Yasnaya Polyana

1898 Finishes “What is Art?”

1901 Excommunicated by Russian Orthodox Church

1905 Writes “I Cannot Be Silent” to protest execution of 1905 revolutionaries

1910 Bitter family fights over copyrights and his will continue, leaves home in the middle of the night, dies of pneumonia days later at Astapovo train station on November 7, aged 82. Buried without religious rites at Yasnaya Polyana.

1908: At work

1908: First color portrait in Russia

Chronology of Course Texts

1872 “God Sees the Truth, But Waits”

1881 “What Men Live By”

1882 Confession

1885 “Two Old Men”

1886 The Death of Ivan Ilych and “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

1903 “Work, Death, and Sickness”

“The artist of the future will understand that to compose a fairy tale, a little song which will touch a lullaby or a riddle which will entertain, a jest which will amuse, or to draw a sketch such as will delight dozens of generations or millions of children and adults, is incomparably more important and more fruitful than to compose a novel, or a symphony, or paint a picture, of the kind which diverts some members of the wealthy classes for a short time and is then forever forgotten. The region of this art of the simplest feelings accessible to all is enormous, and it is as yet almost untouched.”

-Leo Tolstoy, “What is Art (1898)

“Work, Death, and Sickness” (1903)

The Anglo-Russian, January 1904