Count Leo Tolstoy
Count Leo Tolstoy, (1828-1910). Russian novelist. Of noble birth, he left Kazan University before completing his course. In 1852 he joined the army in the Caucasus, where his first stories were written. Ten years later he married the 18-year-old Sofya Bers, known as Sonya, who bore him 13 children. Tolstoy’s master-pieces War and Peace (1862-69) and Anna Karenina (1873-76) are amongst the greatest works of European literature. In 1879 Tolstoy underwent a religious crisis that changed his life; he subsequently gave up smoking and alcohol, became a vegetarian, and renounced literature in favour of ethical teaching. Feeling that his earlier works were worthless and having no desire to gain from them, he divided up his property between his wife and children (1892) and worked as a peasant in the fields. What is Art? (1897) and the novel Resurrection (1899) date from this period. In 1910 he left his home and family in a final quest for peace and solitude, but caught a fever on the train journey and died in the station-master’s house at Astapovo.
“Tolstoy towered above his age as Dante and Michelangelo and Beethoven had done. His novels are marvels of sustained imagination, but his life was full of inconsistencies. He wanted to be one with the peasants, yet he continued to live like an aristocrat. He preached universal love, yet he quarrelled so painfully with his poor demented wife that at the age of 82 he ran away from her. Sir Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (1969)”
