Leo
Tolstoy 1828-1910
Russian writer, one of the world's greatest novelists. The scion of
prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy spent much of his life at his family
estate of Yasnaya Polyana. After a somewhat dissolute youth, he served
in the army and traveled in Europe before returning home and starting
a school for peasant children. He was already known as a brilliant writer
for the short stories in Sevastopol Sketches (185556) and the novel
The Cossacks (1863) when War and Peace (186569) established him as
Russia's preeminent novelist. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it examines
the lives of a large group of characters, centring on the partly autobiographical
figure of the spiritually questing Pierre. Its structure, with its flawless
placement of complex characters in a turbulent historical setting, is
regarded as one of the great technical achievements in the history of
the Western novel. His other great novel, Anna Karenina (187577), focuses
on an aristocratic woman who deserts her husband for a lover and on
the search for meaning by another autobiographical character, Levin.
After its publication Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis and turned
to a form of Christian anarchism. Advocating simplicity and nonviolence,
he devoted himself to social reform. His later works include The Death
of Ivan Ilich (1886), often considered the greatest novella in Russian
literature, and What Is Art? (1898), which condemns fashionable aestheticism
and celebrates art's moral and religious functions. He lived like a
peasant on his great estate, practicing a radical asceticism. Finding
his marriage unbearable, he departed suddenly for the local railway
station, where he contracted a fatal pneumonia in the cold.
Courtesy of Britannica
Concise Encyclopedia. 2003.
