Who Was Leo Tolstoy?
At 6:00 a.m. on 28 October 1910 (15 October O.S.) Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana in the company of his personal physician Dushan Petrovich Makovitsky, taking with him only the manuscript of the play The Living Corpse and a few clothes. He had not told his wife Sophia. Headed south, the 82-year-old count fell ill with pneumonia at the Riazan–Ural railway junction of Astapovo, in the Lipetsk province. He died there, in the station-master’s house, on 7 November 1910 (20 November N.S.) at 6:05 a.m. The Russian State Railways dispatched a special train to bring the family. An estimated ten thousand peasants made the pilgrimage to the funeral at Yasnaya Polyana on 9 November 1910 (22 N.S.), the day of the burial. The bishop of Tula refused to allow the burial service. The Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod had already written that Tolstoy’s “spiritual suicide” had “preceded his physical death” (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002; Troyat, Tolstoy, 1967).
The military years
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on 9 September 1828 (28 August O.S.) at Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, to a family of old Muscovite dvoryanstvo with the rank of Privy Councillor. His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna Volkonskaya, died in 1830; his father, Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, in 1837. He was brought up by aunts in Kazan and entered the University of Kazan in 1844, but left in 1847 without a degree. He joined the army in 1851, served in the Caucasus in 1851–1854, and at Sevastopol in 1854–1855. The Sevastopol Sketches of 1855 were the first Russian account of modern war by a writer who had actually been under fire, and they were the model for every Russian war correspondent of the next sixty years. Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857) were published together as the Autobiographical Trilogy in 1856 (Troyat, 1967; Figes, 2002).
The novels
War and Peace appeared in six volumes from 1865 to 1869 in the Russky vestnik; the first separate edition of 1869 had about 1,500 pages. The novel is set in 1805–1820 and the cast of named characters is over 600; the principal characters are Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, Natasha Rostova, and the old Prince Bolkonsky. Anna Karenina appeared serially in the same journal from 1873 to 1877, and the first book edition of 1878 is the text from which all later printings descend. The novel’s working title was Two Marriages; the title was suggested by the poet Afanasy Fet, who had an affair with the actress Maria Lvovna Tolstaya (Figes, 2002; Christian, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 2002).
The conversion
The spiritual crisis of 1878–1881 was triggered by the death of the 17-year-old dedication-hero of War and Peace, Ilya Tolstoy, in 1860, and by the family troubles around the early 1880s. The result, written between 1882 and 1894, was a coherent doctrine of Christian anarchism, a programme of poverty, celibacy, the rejection of state service and military service, and a literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount. The principal doctrinal texts are: A Confession (1882), What I Believe (1884), The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), and What Is Art? (1898). On 24 February 1901 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, under the ober-procurator Konstantin Pobedonostsev, excommunicated him by the edict “with the sweetest name of Christ” — the Synod’s “no longer a member of the Church” was printed in the Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik and the Tsirkular no. 557 of 19 February 1901. Tolstoy’s reply to Pobedonostsev was the Letter to the Synod, published as a pamphlet (Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1958; Pipes, Russian Conservatism, 2005).
Influence abroad
In 1893 the young Mohandas K. Gandhi, then a 24-year-old lawyer in Pretoria, read a translation of The Kingdom of God Is Within You in the Aryan Path and wrote to the Russian author. The correspondence ran from 1909 to 1910, the year of Tolstoy’s death. Tolstoy Farm in Natal was named for him. The English-language Tolstoyan movement of the 1890s — Edward Carpenter, the Arts and Crafts anti-industrial wing, the Hampstead Colony — was the model for a set of settlements in the United States, including the Veramendi colony in California, the Boynton colony in Washington state, the Westville colony in South Dakota, and the Fredonia colony in Virginia. Tolstoy’s A Letter to the Hindu (1908) was the doctrinal text of the Indian non-resistance movement (Figes, 2002; Bartlett, Tolstoy: A Russian Life, 2011).
The Yasnaya estate
The Yasnaya Polyana estate covered about 5,500 desyatins (about 15,000 acres), was in Tolstoy’s family from 1702, and was the model for the bolotnaya kukushka (Moscow) of Childhood and the Levinka (Levin’s estate) of Anna Karenina. The land was set aside in a 1910 trust, with Sofia Andreyevna as life-tenant and the peasant commune of Yasnaya Polyana as remaindermen. The Tolstoy estate was nationalised in 1921 by the decree “On the Perpetuation of the Memory of L. N. Tolstoy”; the Yasnaya Polyana Museum is the largest of the literary museums in Russia. The 13,000-page manuscript of War and Peace is in the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) in St Petersburg (Bartlett, 2011).