Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy - biography, information, personal life. Tolstoy was excommunicated

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828 at his father's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province. Tolstoy is an old Russian noble family; one representative of this family, the head of the Petrine secret police Petr Tolstoy, was promoted to graphs. Tolstoy's mother was born Princess Volkonskaya. His father and mother served as models for Nikolai Rostov and Princess Marya in War and peace(see summary and analysis of this novel). They belonged to the highest Russian aristocracy, and the tribal belonging to the highest stratum of the ruling class sharply distinguishes Tolstoy from other writers of his time. He never forgot about it (even when this realization of his became completely negative), he always remained an aristocrat and kept aloof from the intelligentsia.

The childhood and adolescence of Leo Tolstoy passed between Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana, in a large family, where there were several brothers. He left unusually vivid memories of his early environment, of his relatives and servants, in wonderful autobiographical notes that he wrote for his biographer P. I. Biryukov. His mother died when he was two years old, his father when he was nine years old. His further upbringing was in charge of his aunt, Mademoiselle Yergolskaya, who supposedly served as the prototype for Sonya in War and peace.

Leo Tolstoy in his youth. Photo 1848

In 1844 Tolstoy entered Kazan University, where he first studied oriental languages ​​and then law, but in 1847 he left the university without receiving a diploma. In 1849, he settled in Yasnaya Polyana, where he tried to be useful to his peasants, but soon realized that his efforts were of no use, because he lacked knowledge. In his student years and after leaving the university, he, as was usual with young people of his class, led a hectic life filled with the pursuit of pleasures - wine, cards, women - somewhat similar to the life that Pushkin led before being exiled to the south. But Tolstoy was incapable of accepting life as it is with a light heart. From the very beginning, his diary (existing since 1847) testifies to an unquenchable thirst for the intellectual and moral justification of life, a thirst that has forever remained the guiding force of his thought. The same diary was the first attempt to develop that technique of psychological analysis, which later became Tolstoy's main literary weapon. His first attempt to try himself in a more purposeful and creative kind of writing dates back to 1851.

The tragedy of Leo Tolstoy. Documentary

In the same year, disgusted by his empty and useless life in Moscow, he went to the Caucasus to the Terek Cossacks, where he entered the garrison artillery cadet (junker means volunteer, volunteer, but of noble birth). The next year (1852) he completed his first story ( Childhood) and sent it to Nekrasov for publication in Contemporary. Nekrasov immediately accepted it and wrote about it to Tolstoy in very encouraging tones. The story was an immediate success, and Tolstoy immediately rose to prominence in literature.

On the battery, Leo Tolstoy led a rather easy and unburdensome life of a cadet with means; the place to stay was nice too. He had a lot of free time most which he used to hunt. In the few fights in which he had to participate, he showed himself very well. In 1854, he received an officer's rank and, at his request, was transferred to the army that fought the Turks in Wallachia (see Crimean War), where he took part in the siege of Silistria. In the autumn of that year, he joined the Sevastopol garrison. There Tolstoy saw a real war. He participated in the defense of the famous Fourth Bastion and in the battle on the Black River and ridiculed bad command in a satirical song - the only work of his in verse known to us. In Sevastopol, he wrote the famous Sevastopol stories that appeared in Contemporary when the siege of Sevastopol was still ongoing, which greatly increased interest in their author. Shortly after leaving Sevastopol, Tolstoy went on vacation to St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the next year he left the army.

Only in these years, after the Crimean War, Tolstoy communicated with the literary world. The writers of St. Petersburg and Moscow met him as an outstanding master and colleague. As he later admitted, success was very flattering to his vanity and pride. But he did not get along with writers. He was too aristocratic to like this semi-bohemian intelligentsia. For him, they were too awkward plebeians, they were indignant that he clearly preferred the light to their company. On this occasion, he and Turgenev exchanged sharp epigrams. On the other hand, his very mindset was not to the liking of progressive Westerners. He did not believe in progress or culture. In addition, his dissatisfaction with the literary world intensified due to the fact that his new works disappointed them. Everything he wrote after Childhood, did not show any movement towards innovation and development, and Tolstoy's critics failed to understand the experimental value of these imperfect works (for more details, see the article Tolstoy's Early Works). All this contributed to his termination of relations with the literary world. The culmination was a noisy quarrel with Turgenev (1861), whom he challenged to a duel, and then apologized for this. This whole story is very typical, and it showed the character of Leo Tolstoy, with his secret embarrassment and sensitivity to insults, with his intolerance for the imaginary superiority of other people. The only writers with whom he maintained friendly relations were the reactionary and "land lord" Fet (in whose house the quarrel with Turgenev broke out) and the democrat-Slavophile Strakhov- people who did not sympathize with the main direction of the then progressive thought.

The years 1856-1861 Tolstoy spent between St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yasnaya Polyana and abroad. He traveled abroad in 1857 (and again in 1860-1861) and brought back a disgust for the selfishness and materialism of European bourgeois civilization. In 1859 he opened a school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana and in 1862 he began publishing a pedagogical journal Yasnaya Polyana, in which the progressive world was surprised by the assertion that it is not the intellectuals who should teach the peasants, but rather the peasants the intellectuals. In 1861 he accepted the post of conciliator, a post introduced to oversee how the emancipation of the peasants was carried out. But the unsatisfied thirst for moral strength continued to torment him. He abandoned the revelry of his youth and began to think about marriage. In 1856 he made the first failed attempt marry (Arsenyeva). In 1860, he was deeply shocked by the death of his brother Nicholas - it was his first encounter with the inevitable reality of death. Finally, in 1862, after long hesitation (he was convinced that since he was old - thirty-four years old! - and ugly, not a single woman would love him) Tolstoy made an offer to Sofya Andreevna Bers, and it was accepted. They got married in September of the same year.

Marriage is one of the two main milestones in Tolstoy's life; the second milestone was his appeal. He was always pursued by one concern - how to justify his life before his conscience and achieve lasting moral well-being. When he was a bachelor, he oscillated between two opposing desires. The first was a passionate and hopeless striving for that integral and unreasoning, “natural” state that he found among the peasants and especially among the Cossacks, in whose village he lived in the Caucasus: this state does not strive for self-justification, for it is free from self-consciousness, this justification demanding. He tried to find such an unquestioning state in conscious obedience to animal impulses, in the lives of his friends, and (and here he came closest to achieving it) in his favorite pastime, hunting. But he was unable to be satisfied with this forever, and another equally passionate desire - to find a rational justification for life - led him aside every time he seemed to have already achieved contentment with himself. Marriage was for him the gateway to a more stable and lasting "state of nature." It was the self-justification of life and the solution of a painful problem. Family life, unreasoning acceptance of it and submission to it, henceforth became his religion.

For the first fifteen years of his married life, Tolstoy lived in a blissful state of contented vegetation, with a peaceful conscience and a hushed need for higher rational justification. The philosophy of this plant conservatism is expressed with great creative power in War and peace(see summary and analysis of this novel). In family life, he was extremely happy. Sofya Andreevna, almost still a girl, when he married her, without difficulty became what he wanted to make her; he explained his new philosophy to her, and she was her indestructible stronghold and unchanging guardian, which eventually led to the breakup of the family. The writer's wife was perfect wife, mother and mistress of the house. In addition, she became a devoted assistant to her husband in literary work - everyone knows that she copied seven times War and peace from the beginning to the end. She bore Tolstoy many sons and daughters. She had no personal life: all of it was dissolved in family life.

Thanks to Tolstoy's prudent management of estates (Yasnaya Polyana was just a place of residence; a large Zavolzhsky estate brought income) and the sale of his works, the family's fortune increased, as did the family itself. But Tolstoy, although absorbed and satisfied with his self-justified life, though glorifying it with unsurpassed artistic power in his best novel, after all, he was not able to completely dissolve in family life, as his wife dissolved. "Life in Art" also did not absorb him as much as his brothers. The worm of moral lust, though reduced to a tiny size, never died. Tolstoy was constantly worried about the questions and demands of morality. In 1866 he defended (unsuccessfully) before a military court a soldier accused of hitting an officer. In 1873, he published articles on public education, on the basis of which the insightful critic Mikhailovsky was able to predict the further development of his ideas.

✍  Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich(August 28 (September 9), 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire - November 7, 1910, Astapovo station, Ryazan province, Russian Empire) - one of the most famous Russian writers and thinkers, one of the greatest writers in the world. Member of the defense of Sevastopol. Enlightener, publicist, religious thinker, his authoritative opinion was the reason for the emergence of a new religious and moral trend - Tolstoyism. Corresponding member Imperial Academy Sciences (1873), honorary academician in the category of fine literature (1900).

A writer who, during his lifetime, was recognized as the head of Russian literature. The work of Leo Tolstoy marked new stage in Russian and world realism, acting as a bridge between the classic novel of the 19th century and the literature of the 20th century. Leo Tolstoy had a strong influence on the evolution of European humanism, as well as on the development of realistic traditions in world literature. The works of Leo Tolstoy were repeatedly filmed and staged in the USSR and abroad; his plays have been staged all over the world.

The most famous works of Tolstoy are the novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, the autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, the stories The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Kreutzerov sonata”, “Hadji Murad”, a series of essays “Sevastopol Tales”, dramas “The Living Corpse” and “The Power of Darkness”, autobiographical religious and philosophical works “Confession” and “What is my faith?” and etc.

§  Biography

¶  Origin

Representative of the Count's branch of the noble family of Tolstoy, descended from Peter's associate P. A. Tolstoy. The writer had extensive family ties in the world of the highest aristocracy. Among the cousins ​​​​of the father are the adventurer and breter F. I. Tolstoy, the artist F. P. Tolstoy, the beauty M. I. Lopukhina, the socialite A. F. Zakrevskaya, the chamber maid of honor A. A. Tolstaya. The poet A. K. Tolstoy was his second cousin. Among the mother's cousins ​​are Lieutenant General D. M. Volkonsky and a wealthy emigrant N. I. Trubetskoy. A.P. Mansurov and A.V. Vsevolozhsky were married to their mother's cousins. Tolstoy was connected by property with the ministers A. A. Zakrevsky and L. A. Perovsky (married to cousins ​​of his parents), the generals of 1812 L. I. Depreradovich (married to his grandmother’s sister) and A. I. Yushkov (brother-in-law of one of aunts), as well as with Chancellor A. M. Gorchakov (brother of the husband of another aunt). The common ancestor of Leo Tolstoy and Pushkin was Admiral Ivan Golovin, who helped Peter I create the Russian fleet.

The features of Ilya Andreevich's grandfather are given in War and Peace to the good-natured, impractical old Count Rostov. The son of Ilya Andreevich, Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy (1794-1837), was the father of Lev Nikolaevich. In some character traits and biography facts, he was similar to Nikolenka's father in "Childhood" and "Boyhood" and partly to Nikolai Rostov in "War and Peace". However, in real life Nikolai Ilyich differed from Nikolai Rostov not only in his good education, but also in his convictions that did not allow him to serve under Nicholas I. He participated in the foreign campaign of the Russian army against Napoleon, including participating in the “battle of the peoples” near Leipzig and was captured by the French, but was able to escape, after the conclusion of peace he retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel of the Pavlograd hussar regiment. Soon after his resignation, he was forced to go to official service so as not to end up in a debtor's prison because of the debts of his father, the Kazan governor, who died under investigation for official abuse. The negative example of his father helped Nikolai Ilyich work out his life ideal - a private independent life with family joys. To put his frustrated affairs in order, Nikolai Ilyich (like Nikolai Rostov) married the already not very young Princess Maria Nikolaevna of the Volkonsky family in 1822, the marriage was happy. They had five children: Nikolai (1823-1860), Sergei (1826-1904), Dmitry (1827-1856), Lev, Maria (1830-1912).

Tolstoy's maternal grandfather, Catherine's General, Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Volkonsky, had some resemblance to the stern rigorist - the old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace. Lev Nikolayevich's mother, similar in some respects to Princess Marya depicted in War and Peace, possessed a wonderful gift for storytelling.

¶ Childhood

Leo Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828 in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province, in the hereditary estate of his mother - Yasnaya Polyana. He was the fourth child in the family. The mother died in 1830 six months after the birth of her daughter from "birth fever", as they said then, when Leo was not yet 2 years old.

A distant relative, T. A. Ergolskaya, took up the upbringing of orphaned children. In 1837, the family moved to Moscow, settling on Plyushchikha, as the eldest son had to prepare to enter the university. Soon, his father, Nikolai Ilyich, suddenly died, leaving affairs (including some lawsuits related to the family’s property) in an unfinished state, and the three younger children again settled in Yasnaya Polyana under the supervision of Yergolskaya and his paternal aunt, Countess A. M. Osten-Saken appointed guardian of the children. Here Lev Nikolaevich remained until 1840, when Countess Osten-Saken died, the children moved to Kazan, to a new guardian - the father's sister P. I. Yushkova.

The Yushkovs' house was considered one of the most cheerful in Kazan; all members of the family highly valued external brilliance. “My good aunt,” says Tolstoy, “the purest being, always said that she would not want anything more for me than for me to have a relationship with a married woman.”

Lev Nikolaevich wanted to shine in society, but his natural shyness and lack of external attractiveness prevented him. The most diverse, as Tolstoy himself defines them, "speculations" about key issues of our being - happiness, death, God, love, eternity - left an imprint on his character in that era of life. What he told in "Adolescence" and "Youth", in the novel "Resurrection" about the aspirations of Irtenyev and Nekhlyudov for self-improvement, was taken by Tolstoy from the history of his own ascetic attempts of this time. All this, wrote the critic S. A. Vengerov, led to the fact that Tolstoy developed, in the words of his story “Adolescence”, “the habit of constant moral analysis, which destroyed the freshness of feeling and clarity of mind.” Citing examples of introspection of this period, he ironically speaks of the exaggeration of his adolescent philosophical pride and greatness, and at the same time notes the insurmountable inability to “get used to not being ashamed of every simple word and movement of his” when confronted with real people, whose benefactor he himself then seemed.

¶ Education

His education was initially carried out by the French tutor Saint-Thomas (the prototype of St.-Jérôme in the story "Boyhood"), who replaced the good-natured German Reselman, whom Tolstoy portrayed in the story "Childhood" under the name of Karl Ivanovich.

In 1843, P. I. Yushkova, taking on the role of guardian of her underage nephews (only the eldest, Nikolai, was an adult) and niece, brought them to Kazan. Following the brothers Nikolai, Dmitry and Sergei, Lev decided to enter the Imperial Kazan University (the most famous at that time), where Lobachevsky worked at the mathematical faculty, and Kovalevsky at the Vostochny. On October 3, 1844, Leo Tolstoy was enrolled as a student in the category of oriental (Arabic-Turkish) literature as a self-paying student. At the entrance exams, in particular, he showed excellent results in the obligatory "Turkish-Tatar language" for admission. According to the results of the year, he had poor progress in the relevant subjects, did not pass the transitional exam and had to re-take the first-year program.

In order to avoid a complete repetition of the course, he moved to the Faculty of Law, where his problems with grades in some subjects continued. The transitional exams in May 1846 were passed satisfactorily (he received one five, three fours and four threes; the average output was three), and Lev Nikolayevich was transferred to the second year. On law faculty Leo Tolstoy stayed less than two years: “It was always difficult for him to have any education imposed by others, and everything he learned in life, he learned himself, suddenly, quickly, with hard work,” writes S. A. Tolstaya in his “Materials to the biography of L. N. Tolstoy. In 1904, he recalled: “... for the first year I ... did nothing. In the second year, I began to study ... there was Professor Meyer, who ... gave me a job - a comparison of Catherine's "Instruction" with Esprit des lois ("The Spirit of the Laws" (fr.) Russian) Montesquieu. ... I was carried away by this work, I went to the village, began to read Montesquieu, this reading opened up endless horizons for me; I began to read Rousseau and left the university, precisely because I wanted to study.

¶  Beginning of literary activity

From March 11, 1847, Tolstoy was in the Kazan hospital, on March 17 he began to keep a diary, where, imitating Benjamin Franklin, he set goals and objectives for self-improvement, noted successes and failures in completing these tasks, analyzed his shortcomings and train of thought, motives for their actions. He kept this diary with short breaks throughout his life.

Having completed his treatment, in the spring of 1847 Tolstoy left his studies at the university and left for Yasnaya Polyana, which he inherited under the division; his activities there are partly described in the work “The Morning of the Landowner”: Tolstoy tried to establish relations with the peasants in a new way. His attempt to somehow alleviate the young landowner's guilt before the people dates back to the same year when D. V. Grigorovich's "Anton-Goremyk" and the beginning of I. S. Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" appeared.

In his diary, Tolstoy formulated for himself a large number of life rules and goals, but he managed to follow only a small part of them. Among the successful ones are serious studies in English, music, and jurisprudence. In addition, neither the diary nor the letters reflected the beginning of Tolstoy's studies in pedagogy and charity, although in 1849 he first opened a school for peasant children. The main teacher was Foka Demidovich, a serf, but Lev Nikolayevich himself often conducted classes.

In mid-October 1848, Tolstoy left for Moscow, settling where many of his relatives and friends lived - in the Arbat area. He stayed at Ivanova's house in Nikolopeskovsky Lane. In Moscow, he was going to start preparing for the candidate's exams, but the classes were never started. Instead, he was attracted to a completely different side of life - social life. In addition to his passion for social life, in Moscow, in the winter of 1848-1849, Lev Nikolayevich first developed a passion for a card game. But since he played very recklessly and not always thinking about his moves, he often lost.

Having left for St. Petersburg in February 1849, he spent time in revelry with K. A. Islavin, his uncle future wife(“My love for Islavin spoiled for me the whole 8 months of my life in St. Petersburg”). In the spring, Tolstoy began to take the exam for a candidate of rights; he passed two exams, from criminal law and criminal proceedings, but he did not take the third exam and went to the village.

Later he came to Moscow, where he often spent time gambling, which often had a negative effect on his financial situation. During this period of his life, Tolstoy was especially passionately interested in music (he himself played the piano well and greatly appreciated his favorite works performed by others). Passion for music prompted him later to write the Kreutzer Sonata.

Tolstoy's favorite composers were Bach, Handel and Chopin. The development of Tolstoy's love for music was also facilitated by the fact that during a trip to St. Petersburg in 1848, he met in a very unsuitable dance class environment with a gifted, but astray German musician, whom he later described in the story "Albert". In 1849, Lev Nikolaevich settled the musician Rudolf in Yasnaya Polyana, with whom he played four hands on the piano. Carried away by music at that time, he played works by Schumann, Chopin, Mozart, Mendelssohn for several hours a day. In the late 1840s, Tolstoy, in collaboration with his acquaintance Zybin, composed a waltz, which he performed in the early 1900s with the composer S. I. Taneyev, who made musical notation this piece of music (the only one composed by Tolstoy). Waltz sounds in the film Father Sergius, based on the novel by L. N. Tolstoy.

A lot of time was also spent on carousing, playing and hunting.

In the winter of 1850-1851 began to write "Childhood". In March 1851 he wrote The History of Yesterday. 4 years after he left the university, Nikolay Nikolayevich's brother, who had served in the Caucasus, arrived in Yasnaya Polyana and invited his younger brother to join military service in the Caucasus. Lev agreed not immediately, until a major loss in Moscow hastened the final decision. Biographers of the writer note a significant and positive influence brother Nikolai to the young and inexperienced in worldly affairs Leo. The older brother, in the absence of his parents, was his friend and mentor.

In order to pay off the debts, it was necessary to reduce their expenses to a minimum - and in the spring of 1851 Tolstoy hurriedly left Moscow for the Caucasus without a specific goal. Soon he decided to enter the military service, but for this he lacked the necessary documents left in Moscow, in anticipation of which Tolstoy lived for about five months in Pyatigorsk, in a simple hut. He spent a significant part of his time hunting, in the company of the Cossack Epishka, the prototype of one of the heroes of the story "The Cossacks", appearing there under the name Eroshka.

In the autumn of 1851, having passed an exam in Tiflis, Tolstoy entered the 4th battery of the 20th artillery brigade, stationed in the Cossack village of Starogladovskaya on the banks of the Terek, near Kizlyar, as a cadet. With some changes in details, she is depicted in the story "Cossacks". The story reproduces a picture of the inner life of a young gentleman who fled from Moscow life. In the Cossack village, Tolstoy began to write again and in July 1852 sent the first part of the future autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, signed only with the initials L. N. T. When sending the manuscript to the journal, Leo Tolstoy attached a letter that said: “... I look forward to your verdict. He will either encourage me to continue my favorite activities, or make me burn everything I started.

Having received the manuscript of Childhood, the editor of Sovremennik, N. A. Nekrasov, immediately recognized its literary value and wrote a kind letter to the author, which had a very encouraging effect on him. In a letter to I. S. Turgenev, Nekrasov noted: “This is a new talent and, it seems, reliable.” The manuscript, by an as yet unknown author, was published in September of the same year. Meanwhile, the beginning and inspired author began to continue the tetralogy "Four Epochs of Development", the last part of which - "Youth" - did not take place. He pondered the plot of The Morning of the Landowner (the finished story was only a fragment of The Novel of the Russian Landowner), The Raid, The Cossacks. Published in Sovremennik on September 18, 1852, Childhood was an extraordinary success; after the publication of the author, they immediately began to rank among the luminaries of the young literary school, along with I. S. Turgenev, Goncharov, D. V. Grigorovich, Ostrovsky, who already enjoyed loud literary fame. Critics Apollon Grigoriev, Annenkov, Druzhinin, Chernyshevsky appreciated the depth of psychological analysis, the seriousness of the author's intentions and the bright convexity of realism.

The relatively late beginning of the career is very characteristic of Tolstoy: he never considered himself a professional writer, understanding professionalism not in the sense of a profession that provides a livelihood, but in the sense of the predominance of literary interests. He did not take the interests of literary parties to heart, he was reluctant to talk about literature, preferring to talk about issues of faith, morality, and social relations.

¶ Military service

As a cadet, Lev Nikolaevich remained for two years in the Caucasus, where he participated in many skirmishes with the highlanders, led by Shamil, and was exposed to the dangers of military life in the Caucasus. He had the right to the St. George Cross, however, in accordance with his convictions, he “conceded” to his fellow soldier, believing that a significant improvement in the conditions of service of a colleague was higher than personal vanity. With the outbreak of the Crimean War, Tolstoy transferred to the Danube army, participated in the battle of Oltenitsa and the siege of Silistria, and from November 1854 to the end of August 1855 was in Sevastopol.

For a long time he lived on the 4th bastion, which was often attacked, commanded a battery in the battle of Chernaya, was bombarded during the assault on Malakhov Kurgan. Tolstoy, despite all the hardships of life and the horrors of the siege, at that time wrote the story "Cutting the Forest", which reflected Caucasian impressions, and the first of the three "Sevastopol stories" - "Sevastopol in December 1854". He sent this story to Sovremennik. It was quickly published and read with interest throughout Russia, making a stunning impression of the horrors that befell the defenders of Sevastopol. The story was seen by Russian Emperor Alexander II; he ordered to take care of the gifted officer.

Even during the life of Emperor Nicholas I, Tolstoy intended to publish, together with artillery officers, the “cheap and popular” magazine “Military List”, but Tolstoy failed to implement the project of the magazine: “My Sovereign, the Emperor, graciously deigned to allow our articles to be printed in Invalid for the project” - bitterly ironic Tolstoy about this.

For the defense of Sevastopol, Tolstoy was awarded the Order of St. Anna 4th degree with the inscription "For Courage", medals "For the Defense of Sevastopol 1854-1855" and "In Memory of the War of 1853-1856". Subsequently, he was awarded two medals "In memory of the 50th anniversary of the defense of Sevastopol": silver as a participant in the defense of Sevastopol and bronze as the author of Sevastopol Tales.

Tolstoy, enjoying the reputation of a brave officer and surrounded by the splendor of fame, had every chance of a career. However, his career was blighted by writing several satirical songs stylized as soldiers. One of these songs was dedicated to the failure during the battle near the Chernaya River on August 4 (16), 1855, when General Read, having misunderstood the order of the commander-in-chief, attacked the Fedyukhin Heights. A song called “Like the fourth number, it was not easy to take the mountains to take us away,” which touched on a number of important generals, was a huge success. For her, Lev Nikolaevich had to answer to the assistant chief of staff A. A. Yakimakh. Immediately after the assault on August 27 (September 8), Tolstoy was sent by courier to St. Petersburg, where he completed Sevastopol in May 1855. and wrote "Sevastopol in August 1855", published in the first issue of Sovremennik for 1856, already with the full signature of the author. "Sevastopol Tales" finally strengthened his reputation as a representative of a new literary generation, and in November 1856 the writer left military service forever with the rank of lieutenant.

¶  Traveling in Europe

In St. Petersburg, the young writer was warmly welcomed in high-society salons and in literary circles. He became closest friends with I. S. Turgenev, with whom they lived for some time in the same apartment. Turgenev introduced him to the Sovremennik circle, after which Tolstoy established friendly relations with such famous writers, as N. A. Nekrasov, I. S. Goncharov, I. I. Panaev, D. V. Grigorovich, A. V. Druzhinin, V. A. Sollogub.

At this time, "Snowstorm", "Two Hussars" were written, "Sevastopol in August" and "Youth" were completed, the writing of future "Cossacks" was continued.

However, a cheerful and eventful life left a bitter aftertaste in Tolstoy's soul, at the same time he began to have a strong discord with a circle of writers close to him. As a result, "people were disgusted with him, and he himself was disgusted" - and at the beginning of 1857 Tolstoy left Petersburg without any regret and went abroad.

On his first trip abroad, he visited Paris, where he was horrified by the cult of Napoleon I (“Deification of the villain, terrible”), at the same time he attended balls, museums, admired the “sense of social freedom”. However, the presence at the guillotining made such a painful impression that Tolstoy left Paris and went to places associated with the French writer and thinker J.-J. Rousseau - on Lake Geneva. In the spring of 1857, I. S. Turgenev described his meetings with Leo Tolstoy in Paris after his sudden departure from St. Petersburg as follows:

Trips to Western Europe - Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Italy (in 1857 and 1860-1861) made a rather negative impression on him. He expressed his disappointment in the European way of life in the story "Lucerne". Tolstoy was disillusioned by the deep contrast between wealth and poverty, which he was able to see through the magnificent outer veil of European culture.

Lev Nikolaevich writes the story "Albert". At the same time, friends never cease to be amazed at his eccentricities: in his letter to I. S. Turgenev in the fall of 1857, P. V. Annenkov told Tolstoy’s project to plant all of Russia with forests, and in his letter to V. P. Botkin, Leo Tolstoy reported how he was very happy the fact that he did not become only a writer, contrary to the advice of Turgenev. However, in the interval between the first and second trips, the writer continued to work on The Cossacks, wrote the story Three Deaths and the novel Family Happiness.

His last novel was published by Mikhail Katkov in Russkiy Vestnik. Tolstoy's collaboration with the Sovremennik magazine, which had lasted since 1852, ended in 1859. In the same year, Tolstoy took part in the organization of the Literary Fund. But his life was not limited to literary interests: on December 22, 1858, he almost died on a bear hunt.

Around the same time, he began an affair with a peasant woman, Aksinya Bazykina, and marriage plans are ripening.

On his next trip, he was mainly interested in public education and institutions aimed at raising the educational level of the working population. He closely studied the issues of public education in Germany and France, both theoretically and practically - in conversations with specialists. From prominent people In Germany, he was most interested in Berthold Auerbach as the author of the Black Forest Tales dedicated to folk life and as a publisher of folk calendars. Tolstoy paid him a visit and tried to get closer to him. In addition, he also met with the German teacher Diesterweg. During his stay in Brussels, Tolstoy met Proudhon and Lelewel. In London, he visited A. I. Herzen, was at a lecture by Charles Dickens.

Tolstoy's serious mood during his second trip to the south of France was also facilitated by the fact that his beloved brother Nikolai died of tuberculosis almost in his arms. The death of his brother made a huge impression on Tolstoy.

Gradually, criticism for 10-12 years cools towards Leo Tolstoy, until the very appearance of War and Peace, and he himself did not seek rapprochement with writers, making an exception only for Afanasy Fet. One of the reasons for this alienation was the quarrel between Leo Tolstoy and Turgenev, which occurred at a time when both prose writers were visiting Fet at the Stepanovka estate in May 1861. The quarrel almost ended in a duel and spoiled the relationship between the writers for a long 17 years.

¶  Treatment in the Bashkir nomad camp Karalyk

In May 1862, Lev Nikolayevich, suffering from depression, on the recommendation of doctors, went to the Bashkir farm Karalyk, Samara province, to be treated with a new and fashionable at that time method of koumiss treatment. Initially, he was going to be in the Postnikov koumiss clinic near Samara, but, having learned that many high-ranking officials were to arrive at the same time (a secular society that the young count could not stand), he went to the Bashkir nomad camp Karalyk, on the Karalyk River, in 130 miles from Samara. There Tolstoy lived in a Bashkir wagon (yurt), ate lamb, sunbathed, drank koumiss, tea, and also had fun playing checkers with the Bashkirs. The first time he stayed there for a month and a half. In 1871, when he had already written "War and Peace", he returned there due to deteriorating health. He wrote about his impressions as follows: “The melancholy and indifference have passed, I feel myself coming into a Scythian state, and everything is interesting and new ... Much is new and interesting: the Bashkirs, who smell of Herodotus, and the Russian peasants, and the villages, especially charming in their simplicity and kindness of the people.

Fascinated by Karalyk, Tolstoy bought an estate in these places, and already the next summer, 1872, he spent with his whole family in it.

¶  Pedagogical activity

In 1859, even before the liberation of the peasants, Tolstoy was actively engaged in organizing schools in his Yasnaya Polyana and throughout the Krapivensky district.

The Yasnaya Polyana school belonged to the number of original pedagogical experiments: in the era of admiration for the German pedagogical school, Tolstoy resolutely rebelled against any regulation and discipline in the school. According to him, everything in teaching should be individual - both the teacher and the student, and their mutual relations. In the Yasnaya Polyana school, the children sat where they wanted, for as long as they wanted, and for as long as they wanted. There was no set curriculum. The teacher's only job was to keep the class interested. The lessons went well. They were led by Tolstoy himself with the help of several permanent teachers and a few random ones, from the closest acquaintances and visitors.

Since 1862, Tolstoy began to publish the pedagogical journal Yasnaya Polyana, where he himself was the main contributor. Not experiencing the vocation of a publisher, Tolstoy managed to publish only 12 issues of the magazine, the last of which appeared with a lag in 1863. In addition to theoretical articles, he also wrote a number of stories, fables and adaptations adapted for elementary school. Put together, Tolstoy's pedagogical articles amounted to whole volume collections of his works. At the time, they went unnoticed. No one paid attention to the sociological basis of Tolstoy's ideas about education, to the fact that Tolstoy saw in education, science, art, and the successes of technology only facilitated and improved ways of exploiting the people by the upper classes. Not only that: from Tolstoy's attacks on European education and "progress" many have deduced the conclusion that Tolstoy is a "conservative."

Soon Tolstoy left pedagogy. Marriage, the birth of his own children, the plans associated with writing the novel "War and Peace" pushed him back ten years pedagogical activities. Only in the early 1870s did he begin to create his own "Azbuka" and published it in 1872, and then released the "New ABC" and a series of four "Russian books for reading", approved as a result of long ordeals by the Ministry of Public Education as manuals for elementary educational institutions. In the early 1870s, classes at the Yasnaya Polyana school were again restored for a short time.

The experience of the Yasnaya Polyana school was subsequently useful to some domestic teachers. So S. T. Shatsky, creating in 1911 his own school-colony "Cheerful Life", repelled from the experiments of Leo Tolstoy in the field of pedagogy of cooperation.

¶  Social activities of Leo Tolstoy in the 1860s

Upon his return from Europe in May 1861, Leo Tolstoy was offered to become a mediator in the 4th section of the Krapivensky district of the Tula province. Unlike those who looked at the people as a younger brother who needed to be raised to their own level, Tolstoy thought, on the contrary, that the people are infinitely higher than cultural classes and that the masters need to borrow the heights of the spirit from the peasants, therefore, having accepted the position of an intermediary, he actively defended the land the interests of the peasants, often violating the royal decrees. “Mediation is interesting and exciting, but it’s not good that all the nobility hated me with all the strength of their souls and thrust me des bâtons dans les roues (French spokes in wheels) from all sides.” The work as an intermediary expanded the range of the writer's observations on the life of the peasants, giving him material for artistic creativity.

In July 1866, Tolstoy spoke at a court-martial as the defender of Vasil Shabunin, company clerk of the Moscow Infantry Regiment stationed near Yasnaya Polyana. Shabunin hit the officer, who ordered to punish him with rods for being drunk. Tolstoy proved Shabunin's insanity, but the court found him guilty and sentenced him to death penalty. Shabunin was shot. This episode made a great impression on Tolstoy, because in this terrible phenomenon he saw a merciless force, which was a state based on violence. On this occasion, he wrote to his friend, publicist P.I. Biryukov:

¶  The heyday of creativity

During the first 12 years after his marriage, he created War and Peace and Anna Karenina. At the turn of this second era literary life Tolstoy are conceived back in 1852 and completed in 1861-1862, The Cossacks, the first of the works in which the talent of the mature Tolstoy was most realized.

The main interest of creativity for Tolstoy manifested itself "in the 'history' of characters, in their continuous and complex movement, development." His goal was to show the ability of the individual to moral growth, improvement, opposition to the environment based on the strength of his own soul.

✓  "War and Peace"

The release of "War and Peace" was preceded by work on the novel "The Decembrists" (1860-1861), to which the author repeatedly returned, but which remained unfinished. And the share of "War and Peace" was an unprecedented success. An excerpt from the novel entitled "1805" appeared in the "Russian Messenger" of 1865; in 1868, three of its parts were published, followed soon by the other two. The first four volumes of War and Peace quickly sold out, and a second edition was needed, which was released in October 1868. The fifth and sixth volumes of the novel were published in one edition, already printed in an increased edition.

"War and Peace" has become a unique phenomenon both in Russian and foreign literature. This work has absorbed all the depth and secrecy of the psychological novel with the scope and multi-figures of the epic fresco. The writer, according to V. Ya. Lakshin, turned to "a special state of the people's consciousness in the heroic time of 1812, when people from different segments of the population united in resistance to foreign invasion", which, in turn, "created the ground for the epic."

The author showed the national Russian features in the "hidden warmth of patriotism", in disgust for ostentatious heroics, in a calm faith in justice, in the modest dignity and courage of ordinary soldiers. He portrayed Russia's war with the Napoleonic troops as a nationwide war. The epic style of the work is conveyed through the fullness and plasticity of the image, the branching and intersection of destinies, incomparable pictures of Russian nature.

In Tolstoy's novel, the most diverse strata of society are widely represented, from emperors and kings to soldiers, all ages and all temperaments in the space of the reign of Alexander I.

Tolstoy was pleased own work, however, already in January 1871, he sent a letter to A. A. Fet: “How happy I am ... that I will never write verbose rubbish like “War” again.” However, Tolstoy hardly crossed out the importance of his previous creations. To the question of Tokutomi Roca (English) Russian. in 1906, which Tolstoy loves most of his work, the writer answered: “The novel“ War and Peace ”.”

✓  "Anna Karenina"

No less dramatic and serious work was the novel about tragic love "Anna Karenina" (1873-1876). Unlike previous work, there is no place in it for the infinitely happy ecstasy of the bliss of being. In almost autobiographical novel Levin and Kitty still have joyful experiences, but in the depiction of Dolly's family life there is already more bitterness, and in the unfortunate end of the love of Anna Karenina and Vronsky there is so much anxiety of spiritual life that this novel is essentially a transition to the third period of Tolstoy's literary activity, the dramatic one.

It has less simplicity and clarity of spiritual movements characteristic of the heroes of "War and Peace", more heightened sensitivity, inner alertness and anxiety. The characters of the main characters are more complex and sophisticated. The author sought to show the subtlest nuances of love, disappointment, jealousy, despair, spiritual enlightenment.

The problematics of this work directly led Tolstoy to the ideological turning point of the late 1870s.

✓  Other works

In March 1879, in Moscow, Leo Tolstoy met Vasily Petrovich Shchegolyonok, and in the same year, at his invitation, he came to Yasnaya Polyana, where he stayed for about a month and a half. The dandy told Tolstoy many folk tales, epics and legends, of which more than twenty were written down by Tolstoy (these notes were published in vol. XLVIII of the Anniversary edition of Tolstoy's works), and the plots of some Tolstoy, if he did not write down on paper, then remembered: six written by Tolstoy works are sourced from the stories of Schegolyonok (1881 - “What people are alive for”, 1885 - “Two old men” and “Three elders”, 1905 - “Roots Vasiliev” and “Prayer”, 1907 - “The old man in the church”). In addition, Tolstoy diligently wrote down many sayings, proverbs, individual expressions and words told by Schegolyonok.

Tolstoy's new worldview was most fully expressed in his works "Confession" (1879-1880, published in 1884) and "What is my faith?" (1882-1884). To the theme of the Christian beginning of love, devoid of any self-interest and rising above sensual love in the struggle with the flesh, Tolstoy dedicated the story The Kreutzer Sonata (1887-1889, published in 1891) and The Devil (1889-1890, published in 1911). In the 1890s, trying to theoretically substantiate his views on art, he wrote a treatise "What is art?" (1897-1898). But the main artistic work those years was his novel "Resurrection" (1889-1899), the plot of which was based on a genuine court case. The sharp criticism of church rites in this work became one of the reasons for the excommunication of Tolstoy by the Holy Synod from the Orthodox Church in 1901. The highest achievements of the early 1900s were the story "Hadji Murad" and the drama "The Living Corpse". In "Hadji Murad" the despotism of Shamil and Nicholas I is equally exposed. In the story, Tolstoy glorified the courage of the struggle, the strength of resistance and love of life. The play "The Living Corpse" became evidence of Tolstoy's new artistic quest, objectively close to Chekhov's drama.

✓  Literary criticism of Shakespeare's works

In his critical essay“On Shakespeare and Drama”, based on a detailed analysis of some of the most popular works of Shakespeare, in particular, “King Lear”, “Othello”, “Falstaff”, “Hamlet”, etc., Tolstoy sharply criticized Shakespeare's abilities as a playwright. At the performance of Hamlet, he experienced "special suffering" for this "false semblance of works of art."

¶  Participation in the Moscow Census

L. N. Tolstoy took part in the Moscow census of 1882. He wrote about it this way: “I suggested using the census in order to find out poverty in Moscow and help her with business and money, and to make sure that there were no poor in Moscow.”

Tolstoy believed that the interest and significance of the census for society is that it gives it a mirror in which you want it, you don’t want it, the whole society and each of us will look. He chose one of the most difficult sites for himself, Protochny Lane, where there was a rooming house, among the Moscow squalor, this gloomy two-story building was called the Rzhanov Fortress. Having received an order from the Duma, Tolstoy, a few days before the census, began to bypass the site according to the plan that was given to him. Indeed, the dirty rooming house, filled with destitute, desperate people who had sunk to the very bottom, served as a mirror for Tolstoy, reflecting the terrible poverty of the people. Under the fresh impression of what he saw, L. N. Tolstoy wrote his famous article "On the census in Moscow." In this article, he pointed out that the purpose of the census was scientific, and was a sociological study.

Despite Tolstoy's declared good intentions of the census, the population was suspicious of this event. On this occasion, Tolstoy wrote: “When they explained to us that the people had already found out about the rounds of the apartments and were leaving, we asked the owner to lock the gate, and we ourselves went to the yard to persuade the people who were leaving.” Lev Nikolaevich hoped to arouse sympathy for urban poverty in the rich, to raise money, to recruit people who wanted to contribute to this cause, and together with the census to go through all the dens of poverty. In addition to fulfilling the duties of a copyist, the writer wanted to enter into communication with the unfortunate, find out the details of their needs and help them with money and work, expulsion from Moscow, placing children in schools, old men and women in shelters and almshouses.

¶  Leo Tolstoy in Moscow

As Muscovite Alexander Vaskin writes, Leo Tolstoy came to Moscow more than one hundred and fifty times.

The general impressions made by him from his acquaintance with Moscow life were, as a rule, negative, and the reviews about the social situation in the city were sharply critical. So, on October 5, 1881, he wrote in his diary:

Many buildings associated with the life and work of the writer have been preserved on Plyushchikha, Sivtsev Vrazhek, Vozdvizhenka, Tverskaya, Nizhny Kislovsky lane, Smolensky Boulevard, Zemledelchesky lane, Voznesensky lane and, finally, Dolgokhamovnichesky lane (modern Leo Tolstoy street) and others. The writer often visited the Kremlin, where the family of his wife, Bersa, lived. Tolstoy liked to walk around Moscow on foot, even in winter. The last time the writer came to Moscow was in 1909.

In addition, along Vozdvizhenka Street, 9, there was the house of Lev Nikolaevich's grandfather, Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Volkonsky, bought by him in 1816 from Praskovya Vasilievna Muravyova-Apostol (daughter of Lieutenant General V.V. Grushetsky, who built this house, the wife of the writer Senator I. M. Muravyov-Apostol, mother of the three Decembrist brothers Muravyov-Apostol). Prince Volkonsky owned the house for five years, which is why the house is also known in Moscow as main house the estates of the princes Volkonsky or as the "house of the Bolkonskys". The house is described by Leo Tolstoy as the house of Pierre Bezukhov. This house was well known to Lev Nikolaevich - he often visited young balls here, where he courted the charming Princess Praskovya Shcherbatova: “I went to the Ryumins with boredom and drowsiness, and suddenly it washed over me. P[raskovya] Sh[erbatova] charm. It hasn't been fresher for a long time." In Anna Karenina, he endowed Kitty Shcherbatskaya with the features of the beautiful Praskovya.

In 1886, 1888 and 1889, Leo Tolstoy walked three times from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana. On the first such journey, his companions were the politician Mikhail Stakhovich and Nikolai Ge (the son of the artist N. N. Ge). In the second - also Nikolai Ge, and from the second half of the way (from Serpukhov) A.N. Dunaev and S.D. Sytin (publisher's brother) joined. During the third journey, Lev Nikolayevich was accompanied by new friend and like-minded 25-year-old teacher Evgeny Popov.

¶  Spiritual crisis and preaching

In his work "Confession" Tolstoy wrote that from the end of the 1870s he often began to be tormented by insoluble questions: "Well, all right, you will have 6,000 acres in the Samara province - 300 heads of horses, and then?"; in the sphere of literature: "Well, well, you will be more glorious than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, all the writers in the world - so what!". Starting to think about raising children, he asked himself: “why?”; discussing “how the people can achieve prosperity,” he “suddenly said to himself: what does it matter to me?” In general, he "felt that what he stood on had given way, that what he had lived for was gone." The natural result was the thought of suicide:

In order to find an answer to the questions and doubts that constantly worried him, Tolstoy first of all took up the study of theology and wrote and published in 1891 in Geneva his “Study of Dogmatic Theology”, in which he criticized the “Orthodox Dogmatic Theology” of Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov). He had conversations with priests and monks, went to the elders in Optina Pustyn (in 1877, 1881 and 1890), read theological treatises, talked with the elder Ambrose, K. N. Leontiev, an ardent opponent of Tolstoy's teachings. In a letter to T. I. Filippov dated March 14, 1890, Leontiev reported that during this conversation he said to Tolstoy: “It’s a pity, Lev Nikolaevich, that I have little fanaticism. But it would be necessary to write to Petersburg, where I have connections, that you be exiled to Tomsk and that neither the countess nor your daughters would even be allowed to visit you, and that they would send you little money. And then you are positively harmful. To this, Lev Nikolayevich exclaimed with fervor: “Darling, Konstantin Nikolayevich! Write, for God's sake, to be exiled. This is my dream. I do my best to compromise myself in the eyes of the government, and I get away with everything. Please write." In order to study the original sources in the original Christian doctrine, studied ancient Greek and Hebrew (in the study of the latter he was helped by the Moscow rabbi Shlomo Minor). At the same time, he kept an eye on the Old Believers, became close to the peasant preacher Vasily Syutaev, talked with Molokans, Stundists. Lev Nikolaevich was looking for the meaning of life in the study of philosophy, in acquaintance with the results exact sciences. He tried to simplify as much as possible, to live a life close to nature and agricultural life.

Gradually Tolstoy refuses whims and comforts rich life(simplification), doing a lot physical labor, dresses in the simplest clothes, becomes a vegetarian, gives the family all his large fortune, renounces literary property rights. On the basis of a sincere desire for moral improvement, the third period of Tolstoy's literary activity is created, the distinguishing feature of which is the denial of all established forms of state, social and religious life.

At the beginning of the reign of Alexander III, Tolstoy wrote to the emperor with a request to pardon the regicides in the spirit of the gospel forgiveness. Since September 1882, a secret supervision was established for him to clarify relations with sectarians; in September 1883, he refuses to serve as a juror, citing incompatibility with his religious worldview. Then he received a ban on public speaking in connection with the death of Turgenev. Gradually, the ideas of Tolstoyanism begin to penetrate society. At the beginning of 1885, a precedent was set in Russia for refusing military service, citing Tolstoy's religious beliefs. A significant part of Tolstoy's views could not be openly expressed in Russia and was presented in full only in foreign editions of his religious and social treatises.

There was no unanimity in relation to Tolstoy's works of art written during this period. So, in a long series of short stories and legends, intended mainly for popular reading(“What makes people alive”, etc.), Tolstoy, in the opinion of his unconditional admirers, reached the pinnacle of artistic power. At the same time, according to people who reproach Tolstoy for turning from an artist into a preacher, these artistic teachings, written with a specific purpose, were rudely tendentious. The high and terrible truth of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, according to fans, which puts this work on a par with the main works of the genius of Tolstoy, according to others, is deliberately harsh, it sharply emphasized the soullessness of the upper strata of society in order to show the moral superiority of a simple "kitchen peasant » Gerasim. The Kreutzer Sonata (written in 1887-1889, published in 1890) also caused opposite reviews - an analysis of marital relations made us forget about the amazing brightness and passion with which this story was written. The work was banned by censorship, it was printed thanks to the efforts of S. A. Tolstaya, who achieved a meeting with Alexander III. As a result, the story was published in a censored form in the Collected Works of Tolstoy by the personal permission of the tsar. Alexander III was pleased with the story, but the queen was shocked. On the other hand, the folk drama The Power of Darkness, in the opinion of Tolstoy's admirers, became a great manifestation of his artistic power: in the narrow framework of the ethnographic reproduction of Russian peasant life, Tolstoy managed to fit so many universal features that the drama went around all the stages of the world with tremendous success.

During the famine of 1891-1892. Tolstoy organized institutions in the Ryazan province to help the starving and the needy. He opened 187 canteens, in which 10 thousand people were fed, as well as several canteens for children, firewood was distributed, seeds and potatoes were distributed for sowing, horses were bought and distributed to farmers (almost all farms became horseless in a famine year), in the form of donations was collected almost 150,000 rubles.

The treatise “The Kingdom of God is within you ...” was written by Tolstoy with short breaks for almost 3 years: from July 1890 to May 1893. The treatise, which aroused the admiration of the critic V.V. Stasov (“the first book of the XIX century”) and I.E. Repin (“this thing of terrifying power”) could not be published in Russia due to censorship, and it was published abroad. The book began to be illegally distributed in a huge number of copies in Russia. In Russia itself, the first legal edition appeared in July 1906, but even after that it was withdrawn from sale. The treatise was included in the collected works of Tolstoy, published in 1911, after his death.

In the last major work, the novel "Resurrection", published in 1899, Tolstoy condemned judicial practice and the high-society life, the clergy and worship portrayed as worldly and united with secular power.

On December 6, 1908, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "People love me for those trifles - War and Peace, etc., which seem very important to them."

In the summer of 1909, one of the visitors to Yasnaya Polyana expressed his delight and gratitude for the creation of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy replied: “It’s like someone came to Edison and said:“ I really respect you for the fact that you dance the mazurka well. I attribute meaning to my completely different books (religious ones!).” In the same year, Tolstoy described the role of his works of art as follows: "They draw attention to my serious things."

Some critics of the last stage of Tolstoy's literary activity declared that his artistic strength had suffered from the predominance of theoretical interests and that now Tolstoy needed creativity only to propagate his socio-religious views in a public form. On the other hand, Vladimir Nabokov, for example, denies that Tolstoy has preaching specifics and notes that the strength and universal meaning of his work have nothing to do with politics and simply crowd out his teaching: “In essence, Tolstoy the thinker has always been occupied by only two topics: Life and death. And no artist can escape these themes.” It has been suggested that in his work What is Art? The Tolstoy part completely denies and partly significantly diminishes the artistic significance of Dante, Raphael, Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, etc., he directly comes to the conclusion that “the more we give ourselves to beauty, the more we move away from good”, affirming the priority of the moral component creativity over aesthetics.

¶  Excommunication

After his birth, Leo Tolstoy was baptized into Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, despite his attitude towards the Orthodox Church, he, like most representatives of the educated society of his time, was indifferent to religious issues in his youth and youth. But in the mid-1870s, he showed an increased interest in the teachings and worship of the Orthodox Church: “I read everything I could about the teachings of the church, ... strictly followed, for more than a year, all the prescriptions of the church, observing all fasts and attending all church services” , the result of which was a complete disappointment in the church faith. The second half of 1879 became a turning point in the direction of the teachings of the Orthodox Church for him. In the 1880s, he took the position of an unambiguously critical attitude towards church doctrine, the clergy, and official churchness. The publication of some of Tolstoy's works was banned by both spiritual and secular censorship. In 1899, Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection" was published, in which the author showed the life of various social strata of contemporary Russia; the clergy were depicted mechanically and hastily performing rituals, and the cold and cynical Toporov was taken by some for a caricature of K. P. Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod.

Leo Tolstoy applied his teachings primarily in relation to his own way of life. He denied ecclesiastical interpretations of immortality and rejected ecclesiastical authority; he did not recognize the rights of the state, since it is built (in his opinion) on violence and coercion. He criticized the church teaching, according to which “life as it is here on earth, with all its joys, beauties, with all the struggle of the mind against darkness, is the life of all the people who lived before me, my whole life with my inner struggle and victories of the mind there is life that is not true, but life that has fallen, hopelessly spoiled; life is true, sinless - in faith, that is, in imagination, that is, in madness. Leo Tolstoy did not agree with the teaching of the church that a person from his birth, in essence, is vicious and sinful, since, in his opinion, such a teaching “cuts down everything that is best in human nature.” Seeing how the church was quickly losing its influence on the people, the writer, according to K. N. Lomunov, came to the conclusion: "Everything living is independent of the church."

In February 1901, the Synod finally inclined to the idea of ​​publicly condemning Tolstoy and declaring him outside the church. Metropolitan Anthony (Vadkovsky) played an active role in this. As it appears in the camera-Fourier magazines, on February 22, Pobedonostsev visited Nicholas II in the Winter Palace and talked with him for about an hour. Some historians believe that Pobedonostsev came to the tsar directly from the Synod with a ready definition.

On February 24 (old style), 1901, the official organ of the synod “Church Gazette published under the Holy Governing Synod” published “Determination of the Holy Synod of February 20-22, 1901 No. 557, with a message to the faithful children of the Greek Orthodox Church about Count Leo Tolstoy.

According to theologians, including Doctor of Historical Sciences, Candidate of Theology, Doctor church history Priest Georgy Orekhanov, the decision of the Synod regarding Tolstoy is not a curse on the writer, but a statement of the fact that he is no longer a member of the Church of his own free will. In addition, the synodal act of February 20-22 stated that Tolstoy could return to the Church if he repented. Metropolitan Anthony (Vadkovsky), who at that time was a leading member of the Holy Synod, wrote to Sofya Andreevna Tolstoy: “All of Russia mourns for your husband, we mourn for him. Do not believe those who say that we are seeking his repentance for political purposes.” Nevertheless, the writer, his entourage and the Russian public felt that this definition was an unjustifiably cruel act. For example, when Tolstoy arrived in Optina Hermitage, when asked why he did not go to the elders, he replied that he could not go, as he was excommunicated.

In his Response to the Synod, Leo Tolstoy confirmed his break with the church: “The fact that I renounced the church that calls itself Orthodox is absolutely fair. But I renounced it not because I rebelled against the Lord, but on the contrary, only because I wanted to serve him with all the strength of my soul. Tolstoy objected to the accusations brought against him in the Synod's decision: “The Synod's decision in general has many shortcomings. It is illegal or deliberately ambiguous; it is arbitrary, unfounded, untrue and, moreover, contains slander and incitement to bad feelings and actions. In the text of the Answer to the Synod, Tolstoy elaborates on these theses, recognizing a number of significant discrepancies between the dogmas of the Orthodox Church and his own understanding of the teachings of Christ.

The synodal definition aroused the indignation of a certain part of society; Numerous letters and telegrams were sent to Tolstoy expressing sympathy and support. At the same time, this definition provoked a flood of letters from another part of society - with threats and abuse.

In November 1909, he wrote down a thought that indicated his broad understanding of religion:

At the end of February 2001, the great-grandson of Count Vladimir Tolstoy, who manages the museum-estate of the writer in Yasnaya Polyana, sent a letter to Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Rus' with a request to revise the synodal definition. In response to the letter, the Moscow Patriarchate stated that the decision to excommunicate Leo Tolstoy from the Church, made exactly 105 years ago, cannot be reconsidered, since (according to the Secretary for Church Relations Mikhail Dudko), this would be wrong in the absence of a person against whom ecclesiastical courts apply. In March 2009, Vladimir Tolstoy expressed his opinion on the significance of the synodal act: “I studied the documents, read the newspapers of that time, got acquainted with the materials of public discussions around the excommunication. And I had a feeling that this act gave a signal for a total split Russian society. The royal family, and the highest aristocracy, and landed nobility, and the intelligentsia, and raznochinsk layers, and ordinary people. The crack went through the body of the entire Russian, Russian people.

¶  Departure from Yasnaya Polyana, death and funeral

On the night of October 28 (November 10), 1910, L. N. Tolstoy, fulfilling his decision to live his last years in accordance with his views, secretly left Yasnaya Polyana forever, accompanied only by his doctor D. P. Makovitsky. At the same time, Tolstoy did not even have a definite plan of action. He began his last journey at Shchyokino station. On the same day, having changed trains at the Gorbachevo station, I reached the city of Belev, Tula province, after that, in the same way, but on another train to the Kozelsk station, hired a coachman and went to Optina Pustyn, and from there the next day to Shamordinsky monastery, where he met his sister, Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya. Later, Tolstoy's daughter Alexandra Lvovna secretly arrived in Shamordino.

On the morning of October 31 (November 13), L. N. Tolstoy and his companions set off from Shamordino to Kozelsk, where they boarded train No. 12, Smolensk - Ranenburg, which had already approached the station, heading east. We did not have time to buy tickets when boarding; having reached Belev, we bought tickets to the Volovo station, where we intended to transfer to some train heading south. Those who accompanied Tolstoy later also testified that the journey had no specific purpose. After the meeting, they decided to go to his niece, E. S. Denisenko, in Novocherkassk, where they wanted to try to get foreign passports and then go to Bulgaria; if this fails, go to the Caucasus. However, on the way, L. N. Tolstoy felt worse - the cold turned into lobar pneumonia and the escorts were forced to interrupt the trip on the same day and take the sick Tolstoy out of the train at the first large station near locality. This station was Astapovo (now Leo Tolstoy, Lipetsk region).

The news of Leo Tolstoy's illness caused a great stir both in the highest circles and among the members of the Holy Synod. On the state of his health and the state of affairs, encrypted telegrams were systematically sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Moscow Gendarme Directorate of Railways. An emergency secret meeting of the Synod was convened, at which, on the initiative of Chief Procurator Lukyanov, the question was raised about the attitude of the church in the event of the sad outcome of Lev Nikolayevich's illness. But the issue has not been positively resolved.

Six doctors tried to save Lev Nikolaevich, but he only replied to their offers to help: "God will arrange everything." When asked what he himself wants, he said: "I want no one to bother me." His last meaningful words, which he uttered a few hours before his death to his eldest son, which he could not make out from excitement, but which the doctor Makovitsky heard, were: “Seryozha ... the truth ... I love a lot, I love everyone ... ".

On November 7 (20), at 6:50 a.m., after a week of severe and painful illness (suffocated), Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy died in the house of the head of the station, I. I. Ozolin.

When Leo Tolstoy came to Optina Pustyn before his death, Elder Varsonofy was the abbot of the monastery and the head of the skete. Tolstoy did not dare to go to the skete, and the elder followed him to the Astapovo station in order to give him the opportunity to reconcile with the Church. He had spare Holy Gifts, and he received instructions: if Tolstoy whispered in his ear just one word “I repent”, he had the right to take communion. But the elder was not allowed to see the writer, just as his wife and some of his closest relatives from among the Orthodox believers were not allowed to see him.

On November 9, 1910, several thousand people gathered in Yasnaya Polyana for the funeral of Leo Tolstoy. Among those gathered were the writer's friends and admirers of his work, local peasants and Moscow students, as well as representatives of government agencies and local police sent to Yasnaya Polyana by the authorities, who feared that the farewell ceremony for Tolstoy might be accompanied by anti-government statements, and perhaps even turns into a demonstration. In addition, in Russia it was the first public funeral of a famous person, which was supposed to take place not according to the Orthodox rite (without priests and prayers, without candles and icons), as Tolstoy himself wished. The ceremony was peaceful, as noted in police reports. The mourners, observing complete order, with quiet singing, escorted Tolstoy's coffin from the station to the estate. People lined up, silently entered the room to say goodbye to the body.

On the same day, the newspapers published the resolution of Nicholas II on the report of the Minister of Internal Affairs on the death of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy: “I sincerely regret the death of the great writer, who, during the heyday of his talent, embodied in his works images of one of the glorious years of Russian life. May the Lord God be a merciful judge for him.”

On November 10 (23), 1910, Leo Tolstoy was buried in Yasnaya Polyana, on the edge of a ravine in the forest, where, as a child, he and his brother were looking for a “green stick” that kept the “secret” how to make all people happy. When the coffin with the deceased was lowered into the grave, all those present reverently knelt down.

In January 1913, a letter was published by Countess S. A. Tolstaya dated December 22, 1912, in which she confirmed the news in the press that a funeral was performed at her husband’s grave by a certain priest in her presence, while she denied rumors about that the priest was not real. In particular, the countess wrote: “I also declare that Lev Nikolayevich never expressed a desire not to be buried before his death, but earlier he wrote in his diary of 1895, as if a testament:“ If possible, then (bury) without priests and funeral . But if this is unpleasant for those who will bury, then let them bury as usual, but as cheaply and simply as possible. The priest, who voluntarily wished to violate the will of the Holy Synod and secretly bury the excommunicated count, turned out to be Grigory Leontyevich Kalinovsky, a priest of the village of Ivankov, Pereyaslavsky district, Poltava province. Soon he was dismissed from his post, but not for the illegal funeral of Tolstoy, but “in view of the fact that he is under investigation for the drunken murder of a peasant, and the aforementioned priest Kalinovsky of behavior and moral qualities is rather disapproving, that is, a bitter drunkard and capable of all sorts of dirty deeds, ”as reported in undercover gendarmerie reports.

✓  Report of Colonel von Cotten, Head of the St. Petersburg Security Department, to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire

The death of Leo Tolstoy was reacted not only in Russia, but all over the world. In Russia, student and worker demonstrations were held with portraits of the deceased, which became a response to the death of the great writer. To honor the memory of Tolstoy, the workers of Moscow and St. Petersburg stopped the work of several plants and factories. There were legal and illegal gatherings, meetings, leaflets were issued, concerts and evenings were canceled, theaters and cinemas were closed at the time of mourning, bookshops and shops were suspended. Many people wanted to take part in the funeral of the writer, but the government, fearing spontaneous unrest, prevented this in every possible way. People could not carry out their intention, so Yasnaya Polyana was literally bombarded with telegrams of condolence. The democratic part of Russian society was outraged by the behavior of the government, which for many years treated Tolstoy, banned his works, and, finally, prevented the honoring of his memory.

§ Family

Lev Nikolaevich from his youthful years was familiar with Lyubov Alexandrovna Islavina, in marriage Bers (1826-1886), loved to play with her children Lisa, Sonya and Tanya. When the daughters of the Berses grew up, Lev Nikolaevich thought about marrying his eldest daughter Lisa, hesitated for a long time until he made a choice in favor of the middle daughter Sophia. Sofya Andreevna agreed when she was 18 years old, and the count was 34 years old, and on September 23, 1862, Lev Nikolaevich married her, having previously confessed to his premarital affairs.

For some time in his life, the brightest period begins - he is truly happy, largely due to the practicality of his wife, material well-being, outstanding literary creativity and, in connection with it, all-Russian and world fame. In the person of his wife, he found an assistant in all matters, practical and literary - in the absence of a secretary, she several times rewrote his drafts. However, very soon happiness is overshadowed by the inevitable small disagreements, fleeting quarrels, mutual misunderstanding, which only worsened over the years.

For his family, Leo Tolstoy proposed a certain “life plan”, according to which he intended to give part of the income to the poor and schools, and to significantly simplify his family’s lifestyle (life, food, clothes), while also selling and distributing “everything superfluous”: piano, furniture, carriages. His wife, Sofya Andreevna, was clearly not satisfied with such a plan, on the basis of which the first serious conflict broke out between them and the beginning of her “undeclared war” for the secure future of her children. And in 1892, Tolstoy signed a separate act and transferred all the property to his wife and children, not wanting to be the owner. However, together they lived in great love for almost fifty years.

In addition, his older brother Sergei Nikolaevich Tolstoy was going to marry Sofya Andreevna's younger sister, Tatyana Bers. But Sergei's unofficial marriage to the gypsy singer Maria Mikhailovna Shishkina (who had four children from him) made it impossible for Sergei and Tatyana to marry.

In addition, the father of Sofya Andreevna, medical doctor Andrey Gustav (Evstafievich) Bers, even before his marriage to Islavina, had a daughter, Varvara, from Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva, the mother of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. By mother, Varya was the sister of Ivan Turgenev, and by father - S. A. Tolstoy, thus, together with marriage, Leo Tolstoy acquired kinship with I. S. Turgenev.

From the marriage of Lev Nikolaevich with Sofia Andreevna, 9 sons and 4 daughters were born, five of thirteen children died in childhood.

1. Sergei (1863-1947), composer, musicologist. The only one of all the writer's children who survived the October Revolution who did not emigrate. Cavalier of the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.
2. Tatiana (1864-1950). Since 1899 she has been married to Mikhail Sukhotin. In 1917-1923 she was the curator of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum Estate. In 1925 she emigrated with her daughter. Daughter Tatyana Sukhotina-Albertini (1905-1996).
3. Ilya (1866-1933), writer, memoirist. In 1916 he left Russia and went to the USA.
4. Lev (1869-1945), writer, sculptor. Since 1918 in exile - in France, Italy, then in Sweden.
5. Maria (1871-1906). Since 1897 she has been married to Nikolai Leonidovich Obolensky (1872-1934). Died of pneumonia. Buried in the village Kochaki of the Krapivensky district (modern Tul. region, Shchekinsky district, village of Kochaki).
6. Peter (1872-1873)
7. Nicholas (1874-1875)
8. Barbara (1875-1875)
9. Andrei (1877-1916), official special assignments under the Tula governor. Member of the Russo-Japanese War. He died in Petrograd from a general blood poisoning.
10. Mikhail (1879-1944). In 1920 he emigrated and lived in Turkey, Yugoslavia, France and Morocco. He died on October 19, 1944 in Morocco.
11. Alexey (1881-1886)
12. Alexandra (1884-1979). From the age of 16 she became an assistant to her father. Head of the military medical detachment during the First World War. In 1920, the Cheka was arrested in the case of the "Tactical Center", sentenced to three years, after her release she worked in Yasnaya Polyana. In 1929 she emigrated from the USSR, in 1941 she received US citizenship. She died on September 26, 1979 in the state of New York at the age of 95, the last of all the children of Leo Tolstoy, more than 150 years after the birth of her father.
13. Ivan (1888-1895).

As of 2010 in total there were more than 350 descendants of Leo Tolstoy (including both living and already deceased), who lived in 25 countries of the world. Most of them are descendants of Leo Tolstoy, who had 10 children. Since 2000, Yasnaya Polyana has hosted meetings of the writer's descendants every two years.

✓  Tolstoy's views on family and family in Tolstoy's work

Leo Tolstoy, both in his personal life and in his work, assigned the central role to the family. According to the writer, the main institution of human life is not the state or the church, but the family. From the very beginning of his creative activity, Tolstoy was absorbed in thoughts about the family and dedicated his first work, Childhood, to this. Three years later, in 1855, he writes the story "Marker's Notes", where the writer's craving for gambling and women can already be seen. The same is reflected in his novel "Family Happiness", in which the relationship between a man and a woman is strikingly similar to the marital relationship between Tolstoy himself and Sofya Andreevna. During the period of happy family life (1860s), which created a stable atmosphere, spiritual and physical balance and became a source of poetic inspiration, two of the writer's greatest works were written: "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina". But if in "War and Peace" Tolstoy firmly defends the value of family life, being convinced of the fidelity of the ideal, then in "Anna Karenina" he already expresses doubts about its attainability. When relations in his personal family life became more difficult, these aggravations were expressed in such works as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil and Father Sergius.

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy devoted to his family great attention. His reflections are not limited to the details of marital relations. In the trilogy "Childhood", "Boyhood" and "Youth", the author gave a bright artistic description the world of a child, in whose life an important role is played by the child's love for his parents, and vice versa - the love that he receives from them. In War and Peace, Tolstoy has already most fully revealed the different types of family relationships and love. And in "Family Happiness" and "Anna Karenina" various aspects of love in the family are simply lost behind the power of "eros". Critic and philosopher N. N. Strakhov after the release of the novel "War and Peace" noted that all of Tolstoy's previous works can be classified as preliminary studies, culminating in the creation of a "family chronicle".

§  Philosophy

The religious and moral imperatives of Leo Tolstoy were the source of the Tolstoy movement, built on two fundamental theses: "simplification" and "non-resistance to evil by violence." The latter, according to Tolstoy, is recorded in a number of places in the Gospel and is the core of the teachings of Christ, as, indeed, of Buddhism. The essence of Christianity, according to Tolstoy, can be expressed in a simple rule: "Be kind and do not resist evil with violence" - "The Law of Violence and the Law of Love" (1908).

The most important basis of Tolstoy's teachings were the words of the Gospel "Love your enemies" and the Sermon on the Mount. The followers of his teachings - the Tolstoyans - honored the five commandments proclaimed by Lev Nikolaevich: do not be angry, do not commit adultery, do not swear, do not resist evil with violence, love your enemies as your neighbor.

Among the adherents of the doctrine, and not only, Tolstoy's books "What is my faith", "Confession", etc. were very popular. Tolstoy's life teaching was influenced by various ideological currents: Brahminism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Islam, as well as the teachings of moral philosophers (Socrates, late Stoics, Kant, Schopenhauer).

Tolstoy developed a special ideology of non-violent anarchism (it can be described as Christian anarchism), which was based on a rationalistic understanding of Christianity. Considering coercion to be evil, he concluded that it was necessary to abolish the state, but not through a revolution based on violence, but through the voluntary refusal of each member of society to perform any public duties, whether it be military service, paying taxes, etc. L.N. Tolstoy believed: “Anarchists are right in everything: both in the denial of the existing, and in the assertion that, given the existing mores, nothing can be worse than the violence of power; but they are grossly mistaken in thinking that anarchy can be established by revolution.

The ideas of nonviolent resistance outlined by L. N. Tolstoy in his work “The Kingdom of God is within you” influenced Mahatma Gandhi, who corresponded with the Russian writer.

According to the historian of Russian philosophy V.V. Zenkovsky, the great philosophical significance of Leo Tolstoy, and not only for Russia, is in his desire to build a culture on a religious basis and in his personal example of liberation from secularism. In Tolstoy's philosophy, he notes the coexistence of heteropolar forces, the "sharp and unobtrusive rationalism" of his religious and philosophical constructions, and the irrationalistic insurmountability of his "panmoralism": "Although Tolstoy does not believe in the Deity of Christ, Tolstoy believed His words in the way that only those who who sees God in Christ”, “follows him as God”. One of the key features of Tolstoy's worldview is the search for and expression of "mystical ethics", to which he considers it necessary to subordinate all secularized elements of society, including science, philosophy, art, considers it "blasphemy" to put them on the same level with good. The ethical imperative of the writer explains the lack of contradiction between the titles of the chapters of the book "The Way of Life": " To a reasonable person it is impossible not to recognize God” and “God cannot be known by reason”. In contrast to the patristic, and later Orthodox, identification of beauty and goodness, Tolstoy emphatically declares that "goodness has nothing to do with beauty." In the book Reading Circle, Tolstoy quotes John Ruskin: “Art is only in its proper place when its goal is moral perfection. If art does not help people to discover the truth, but only provides a pleasant pastime, then it is a shameful, not sublime thing. On the one hand, Zenkovsky characterizes Tolstoy's divergence with the church not so much as a reasonably justified result, but as a "fatal misunderstanding", since "Tolstoy was an ardent and sincere follower of Christ." Tolstoy explains the denial of the church's view of dogma, the Divinity of Christ and His Resurrection by the contradiction between "rationalism, internally completely inconsistent with its mystical experience." On the other hand, Zenkovsky himself notes that “already in Gogol, for the first time, the theme of the internal heterogeneity of the aesthetic and moral sphere is raised; for reality is alien to the aesthetic principle.

§  Bibliography

Of the writings of Leo Tolstoy, 174 of his works of art have survived, including unfinished compositions and rough sketches. Tolstoy himself considered 78 of his works to be completely finished works; only they were printed during his lifetime and were included in collected works. The remaining 96 of his works remained in the archive of the writer himself, and only after his death they saw the light.

The first of his published works is the story "Childhood", 1852. The first lifetime published book of the writer - "Military stories of Count L. N. Tolstoy" 1856, St. Petersburg; in the same year, his second book, Childhood and Adolescence, was published. The last work of art published during Tolstoy's lifetime is the artistic essay "Grateful Soil", dedicated to Tolstoy's meeting with a young peasant in Meshchersky on June 21, 1910; The essay was first published in 1910 in the Rech newspaper. A month before his death, Leo Tolstoy worked on the third version of the story "There are no guilty in the world."

¶  Lifetime and posthumous editions of collected works

In 1886, the wife of Lev Nikolaevich for the first time published the collected works of the writer. For literary science, a milestone was the publication of the Complete (Jubilee) Collected Works of Tolstoy in 90 volumes (1928-58), which included many new literary texts, letters and diaries of the writer.

In addition, and later, collected works of his works were repeatedly published: in 1951-1953, "Collected Works in 14 volumes" (Moscow, Goslitizdat), in 1958-1959, "Collected Works in 12 volumes" (Moscow, Goslitizdat), in 1960- 1965 "Collected works in 20 volumes" (Moscow, ed. "Fiction"), in 1972 "Collected works in 12 volumes" (Moscow, ed. "Fiction"), in 1978-1985 "Collected works in 22 volumes (in 20 books) "(Moscow, ed. "Fiction"), in 1980 "Collected works in 12 volumes" (Moscow, ed. "Sovremennik"), in 1987 "Collected works in 12 volumes "(Moscow, ed. "Pravda").

¶  Translations of Tolstoy

During the Russian Empire for 30 years before October revolution 10 million copies of Tolstoy's books were published in Russia in 10 languages. Over the years of the existence of the USSR, Tolstoy's works were published in the Soviet Union in an amount of over 60 million copies in 75 languages.

The translation of the complete works of Tolstoy into Chinese was carried out by Cao Ying, the work took 20 years.

¶  Worldwide recognition. Memory

Four museums dedicated to the life and work of Leo Tolstoy have been created on the territory of Russia. The estate of Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana, together with all the surrounding forests, fields, gardens and lands, has been turned into a museum-reserve, its branch is the museum-estate of L. N. Tolstoy in the village of Nikolskoye-Vyazemskoye. Under the protection of the state is Tolstoy's estate in Moscow (Leo Tolstoy Street, 21), which, on the personal instructions of V.I. Lenin, was turned into a memorial museum. Also turned into a museum house at the station Astapovo, Moscow-Kursk-Donbass railway. (now Lev Tolstoy station, Moscow railway), where the writer died. The largest of the museums of Tolstoy, as well as the center of research work on the study of the life and work of the writer, is the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy in Moscow (Prechistenka st., 11/8). Many schools, clubs, libraries and other cultural institutions are named after the writer in Russia. His name is district center and railway station (former Astapovo) of the Lipetsk region; district and district center Kaluga region; the village (formerly Stary Yurt) of the Grozny region, where Tolstoy visited in his youth. In many Russian cities there are squares and streets named after Leo Tolstoy. IN different cities Monuments to the writer have been erected in Russia and the world. In Russia, monuments to Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy were erected in a number of cities: in Moscow, in Tula (as a native of the Tula province), in Pyatigorsk, Orenburg.

§  Significance and influence of Tolstoy's work

The nature of the perception and interpretation of Leo Tolstoy's work, as well as the nature of his influence on individual artists and on the literary process, was largely determined by the characteristics of each country, its historical and artistic development. So, the French writers perceived him, first of all, as an artist who opposed naturalism and knew how to combine truthful image life with spirituality and high moral purity. English writers relied on his work in the fight against traditional "Victorian" hypocrisy, they saw in him an example of high artistic courage. In the United States, Leo Tolstoy became a mainstay for writers who asserted acute social themes in art. In Germany, his anti-militarist speeches acquired the greatest importance, German writers studied his experience. realistic image war. Writers Slavic peoples impressed by his sympathy for the "small" oppressed nations, as well as the national heroic theme of his works.

Leo Tolstoy had a huge impact on the evolution of European humanism, on the development of realistic traditions in world literature. His influence affected the work of Romain Rolland, François Mauriac and Roger Martin du Gard in France, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe in the USA, John Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw in England, Thomas Mann and Anna Zegers in Germany, August Strindberg and Arthur Lundqvist in Sweden, Rainer Rilke in Austria, Eliza Orzeszko, Bolesław Prus, Yaroslav Ivashkevich in Poland, Maria Puimanova in Czechoslovakia, Lao She in China, Tokutomi Roca in Japan, and each of them experienced this influence in their own way.

Western humanist writers, such as Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw, the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, listened attentively to the accusing voice of the author in his works Resurrection, Fruits of Enlightenment, Kreutzer Sonata, Death of Ivan Ilyich ". Tolstoy's critical worldview penetrated their consciousness not only through his journalism and philosophical works, but also through his works of art. Heinrich Mann said that the works of Tolstoy were for the German intelligentsia an antidote to Nietzscheism. For Heinrich Mann, Jean-Richard Blok, Hamlin Garland, Leo Tolstoy was a model of great moral purity and intransigence towards social evil and attracted them as an enemy of the oppressors and a defender of the oppressed. The aesthetic ideas of Tolstoy's worldview were reflected in one way or another in Romain Rolland's book "People's Theatre", in articles by Bernard Shaw and Boleslav Prus (treatise "What is Art?") and in Frank Norris's book "The Responsibility of a Novelist", in which the author repeatedly refers to Tolstoy .

For Western European writers of the generation of Romain Rolland, Leo Tolstoy was an older brother, a teacher. It was the center of attraction for democratic and realistic forces in the ideological and literary struggle of the beginning of the century, but also the subject of daily heated debate. At the same time, for later writers, the generation of Louis Aragon or Ernest Hemingway, Tolstoy's work became part of the cultural wealth that they assimilated back in early years. Today, many foreign prose writers, who do not even consider themselves students of Tolstoy and do not define their attitude towards him, at the same time assimilate elements of his creative experience, which has become the common property of world literature.

Leo Tolstoy was nominated 16 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902-1906. and 4 times for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902 and 1909.

§  Writers, thinkers and religious figures about Tolstoy

• French writer and member of the French Academy André Maurois claimed that Leo Tolstoy is one of the three greatest writers in the history of culture (along with Shakespeare and Balzac).
• The German writer, Nobel Prize winner in literature Thomas Mann said that the world did not know another artist in whom the epic, Homeric beginning would be as strong as that of Tolstoy, and that the elements of the epic and indestructible realism live in his works.
• The Indian philosopher and politician Mahatma Gandhi spoke of Tolstoy as the most honest man of his time, who never tried to hide the truth, embellish it, fearing neither spiritual nor secular power, supporting his preaching with deeds and making any sacrifices for the sake of truth.
• The Russian writer and thinker Fyodor Dostoevsky said in 1876 that only Tolstoy shines with the fact that, in addition to the poem, "knows to the smallest accuracy (historical and current) the depicted reality."
• Russian writer and critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote about Tolstoy: “His face is the face of humanity. If the inhabitants of other worlds asked our world: who are you? - humanity could answer by pointing to Tolstoy: here I am.
• The Russian poet Alexander Blok spoke of Tolstoy: “Tolstoy is the greatest and the only genius modern Europe, the highest pride of Russia, a man whose only name is fragrance, a writer of great purity and holiness.
• The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his English Lectures on Russian Literature: “Tolstoy is an unsurpassed Russian prose writer. Leaving aside his predecessors Pushkin and Lermontov, all the great Russian writers can be built in this sequence: the first is Tolstoy, the second is Gogol, the third is Chekhov, the fourth is Turgenev.
• Russian religious philosopher and writer Vasily Rozanov about Tolstoy: "Tolstoy is only a writer, but not a prophet, not a saint, and therefore his teaching does not inspire anyone."
• The famous theologian Alexander Men said that Tolstoy is still the voice of conscience and a living reproach for people who are sure that they live in accordance with moral principles.

§  Criticism

Many newspapers and magazines of all political trends wrote about Tolstoy during his lifetime. Thousands of critical articles and reviews have been written about him. His early works found appreciation in revolutionary democratic criticism. However, "War and Peace", "Anna Karenina" and "Resurrection" did not receive real disclosure and coverage in contemporary criticism. His novel "Anna Karenina" was not well received by the critics of the 1870s; the ideological system of the novel remained undiscovered, as well as its amazing artistic power. At the same time, Tolstoy himself, not without irony, wrote: “If myopic critics think that I wanted to describe only what I like, how Oblonsky dine and what kind of shoulders Karenina has, then they are mistaken.”

¶  Literary criticism

The first in the press to respond favorably to Tolstoy's literary debut was the critic of Fatherland Notes S. S. Dudyshkin in 1854 in an article devoted to the stories "Childhood" and "Boyhood". However, two years later, in 1856, the same critic wrote a negative review of the book edition of Childhood and Boyhood, Military Tales. In the same year, a review of N. G. Chernyshevsky on these books of Tolstoy appeared, in which the critic draws attention to the writer's ability to depict human psychology in its contradictory development. In the same place, Chernyshevsky writes about the absurdity of reproaches to Tolstoy by S. S. Dudyshkin. In particular, objecting to the critic's remark that Tolstoy does not depict female characters in his works, Chernyshevsky draws attention to the image of Lisa from The Two Hussars. In 1855-1856, one of the theorists of "pure art" P. V. Annenkov also highly appreciated Tolstoy's work, noting the depth of thought in the works of Tolstoy and Turgenev and the fact that Tolstoy's thought and its expression by means of art are merged together. At the same time, another representative of "aesthetic" criticism, A. V. Druzhinin, in reviews of "The Snowstorm", "Two Hussars" and "Military Stories" described Tolstoy as a deep connoisseur public life and subtle researcher of the human soul. Meanwhile, the Slavophile K. S. Aksakov in 1857 in the article “Review of Modern Literature” found in the work of Tolstoy and Turgenev, along with “truly beautiful” works, the presence of unnecessary details, due to which “the general line is lost, connecting them into one whole ".

In the 1870s, P. N. Tkachev, who believed that the writer’s task was to express the liberating aspirations of the “progressive” part of society in his work, in his article “Salon Art”, dedicated to the novel “Anna Karenina”, spoke sharply negatively about the work of Tolstoy.

N. N. Strakhov compared the novel "War and Peace" in its scale with the work of Pushkin. The genius and innovation of Tolstoy, according to the critic, manifested itself in the ability of "simple" means to create a harmonious and comprehensive picture of Russian life. The writer's inherent objectivity allowed him to "deeply and truthfully" depict the dynamics of the characters' inner life, which is not subject to any initially given schemes and stereotypes in Tolstoy. The critic also noted the author's desire to find the best features in a person. What Strakhov especially appreciates in the novel is that the writer is interested not only in the spiritual qualities of the individual, but also in the problem of supra-individual - family and communal - consciousness.

The philosopher K. N. Leontiev, in the pamphlet Our New Christians published in 1882, expressed doubts about the socio-religious viability of the teachings of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. According to Leontiev, Dostoevsky's Pushkin speech and Tolstoy's story "What makes people alive" show the immaturity of their religious thinking and the insufficient familiarity of these writers with the content of the works of the Church Fathers. Leontiev believed that Tolstoy's "religion of love", adopted by the majority of "neo-Slavophiles", distorts the true essence of Christianity. Leontiev's attitude to Tolstoy's works of art was different. The novels "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" were declared by the critic to be the greatest works of world literature "in the last 40-50 years". Considering the main shortcoming of Russian literature to be the “humiliation” of Russian reality dating back to Gogol, the critic believed that only Tolstoy managed to overcome this tradition by depicting “higher Russian society ... finally in a human way, that is, impartially, and in places with obvious love.” N. S. Leskov in 1883 in the article “Count L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky as Heresiarchs (The Religion of Fear and the Religion of Love)” criticized Leontiev’s pamphlet, convicting him of “convenience”, ignorance of patristic sources and misunderstanding the only argument chosen from them (which Leontiev himself admitted).

N. S. Leskov shared the enthusiastic attitude of N. N. Strakhov to the works of Tolstoy. Contrasting Tolstoy's "religion of love" with K. N. Leontiev's "religion of fear", Leskov believed that it was the former that was closer to the essence of Christian morality.

Later, Tolstoy's work was highly appreciated, unlike most democratic critics, by Andreevich (E. A. Solovyov), who published his articles in the journal of "legal Marxists" Life. In the late Tolstoy, he especially appreciated the “inaccessible truth of the image”, the realism of the writer, tearing the veils “from the conventions of our cultural and social life”, revealing “its lie, covered with lofty words” (“Life”, 1899, No. 12).

Critic I. I. Ivanov found in the literature of the late 19th century "naturalism", which goes back to Maupassant, Zola and Tolstoy and is an expression of a general moral decline.

In the words of K. I. Chukovsky, “in order to write“ War and Peace ”- just think with what terrible greed it was necessary to pounce on life, grab everything around with eyes and ears, and accumulate all this immeasurable wealth ...” (article “Tolstoy as artistic genius", 1908).

The representative of Marxist literary criticism, which was developed at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, V. I. Lenin believed that Tolstoy in his works was the spokesman for the interests of the Russian peasantry.

The Russian poet and writer, Nobel Prize winner in literature Ivan Bunin, in his study "The Liberation of Tolstoy" (Paris, 1937), characterized Tolstoy's artistic nature as a tense interaction of "animal primitiveness" and a refined taste for the most complex intellectual and aesthetic quests.

¶  Religious criticism

Opponents and critics of Tolstoy's religious views were Church historian Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Vladimir Solovyov, Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, historian-theologian Georgy Florovsky, candidate of theology John of Kronstadt.

¶  Criticism of the social views of the writer

In Russia, the opportunity to openly discuss in the press the social and philosophical views of the late Tolstoy appeared in 1886 in connection with the publication in the 12th volume of his collected works of an abridged version of the article “So what should we do?”.

The controversy around the 12th volume was opened by A. M. Skabichevsky, condemning Tolstoy for his views on art and science. H. K. Mikhailovsky, on the contrary, expressed support for Tolstoy's views on art: “In the XII volume of the Works of gr. Tolstoy much is said about the absurdity and illegitimacy of the so-called "science for the sake of science" and "art for the sake of art" ... Gr. Tolstoy says a lot of things that are true in this sense, and in relation to art, this is extremely significant in the mouth of a first-class artist.

Romain Rolland, William Howells, Emile Zola responded to Tolstoy's article abroad. Later, Stefan Zweig, highly appreciating the first, descriptive part of the article (“... social criticism has hardly ever been more brilliantly demonstrated on an earthly phenomenon than in the depiction of these rooms of beggars and downtrodden people”), at the same time remarked: “but hardly, in the second part, the utopian Tolstoy moves from diagnosis to therapy and tries to preach objective methods of correction, each concept becomes vague, contours fade, thoughts that drive one another stumble. And this confusion grows from problem to problem.”

V. I. Lenin in the article “L. N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labor Movement" wrote about Tolstoy's "powerless curses" against capitalism and "the power of money". According to Lenin, Tolstoy's critique of the modern order "reflects a turning point in the views of millions of peasants who have just emerged from serfdom and saw that this freedom means new horrors of ruin, starvation, homeless life ...". Earlier, in Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution (1908), Lenin wrote that Tolstoy was ridiculous, like a prophet who discovered new recipes for the salvation of mankind. But at the same time, he is great as a spokesman for the ideas and moods that had developed among the Russian peasantry at the time of the onset of the bourgeois revolution in Russia, and also that Tolstoy is original, since his views express the features of the revolution as a peasant bourgeois revolution. In the article "L. N. Tolstoy" (1910) Lenin points out that the contradictions in Tolstoy's views reflect "contradictory conditions and traditions that determined the psychology of various classes and strata of Russian society in the post-reform but pre-revolutionary era."

G. V. Plekhanov in his article "Confusion of Ideas" (1911) highly appreciated Tolstoy's criticism of private property.

V. G. Korolenko wrote about Tolstoy in 1908 that his beautiful dream of establishing the first centuries of Christianity can have a strong effect on simple souls, but the rest cannot follow him to this “dreamed” country. According to Korolenko, Tolstoy knew, saw and felt only the very bottom and the very heights of the social system, and it is easy for him to refuse "one-sided" improvements, such as a constitutional order.

Maxim Gorky was enthusiastic about Tolstoy as an artist, but condemned his teachings. After Tolstoy spoke out against the Zemstvo movement, Gorky, expressing the dissatisfaction of his like-minded people, wrote that Tolstoy was captured by his idea, separated from Russian life and stopped listening to the voice of the people, hovering too high above Russia.

Sociologist and historian M. M. Kovalevsky said that Tolstoy’s economic doctrine (the main idea of ​​which is borrowed from the Gospels) shows only that the social doctrine of Christ, perfectly adapted to the simple customs, rural and pastoral life of Galilee, cannot serve as a rule behavior of modern civilizations.

A detailed polemic with the teachings of Tolstoy is contained in the study of the Russian philosopher I. A. Ilyin "On resistance to evil by force" (Berlin, 1925).

§  Tolstoy in the cinema

In 1912, the young director Yakov Protazanov made a 30-minute silent film The Departure of the Great Old Man, based on testimonies about the last period of Leo Tolstoy's life, using documentary footage. In the role of Leo Tolstoy - Vladimir Shaternikov, in the role of Sophia Tolstoy - British-American actress Muriel Harding, who used the pseudonym Olga Petrova. The film was received very negatively by the writer's relatives and his entourage and was not released in Russia, but was shown abroad.

A Soviet feature film is dedicated to Leo Tolstoy and his family Feature Film directed by Sergei Gerasimov "Leo Tolstoy" (1984). The film tells about the last two years of the writer's life and his death. main role The film was performed by the director himself, in the role of Sofya Andreevna - Tamara Makarova. In the Soviet TV movie “The Shore of His Life” (1985), about the fate of Nikolai Miklukho-Maclay, the role of Tolstoy was played by Alexander Vokach.

In the 2009 film The Last Sunday by American director Michael Hoffman, the role of Leo Tolstoy was played by Canadian Christopher Plummer, for this work he was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category. British actress Helen Mirren, whose Russian ancestors were mentioned by Tolstoy in War and Peace, played the role of Sophia Tolstaya and was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress.

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy is brilliant writer who was able to leave an indelible mark on the history of Russian literature. Currently, his work is being studied in schools, colleges and other educational institutions. Leo Tolstoy was distinguished by his modesty. He just liked writing, interpreting thoughts in different ways and conveying the main ideas to people. Being for the writer was an integral part of life, and not to write about everyday life and ordinary life peasants was impossible. Leo Tolstoy - biography: childhood, life principles, creativity, offspring - we will talk about all this now.

Life position of the writer

Leo Tolstoy called himself a Christian until the end of his days. In his heart he wanted to be on a par with other ordinary people and look at their lives, live just like them. By decision of the Synod, he was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, but this did not prevent him from communicating with the peasants and learning from them a difficult way of life. In the 1970s, he became seriously interested in philosophy. Today it is known that he prepared articles for publication in the Posrednik publishing house. These were articles about the philosophers of India and the Middle East. Interest in philosophy remained with the writer until last days his life. Tolstoy knew by heart such works as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

As it became known later, the writer was in a group with famous Indian scientists. From them he learned about the philosophy of India, about the life of people and about their plans. According to the correspondence, one could understand that he agrees with the religion of India and is trying to copy the model of life of ordinary Indians.

What was Leo Tolstoy

As his contemporaries noted, the writer was a complex person. It was very difficult to prove my point of view to him and convince him. If he thought it necessary to do one way or another, he always did crazy things. This did not prevent him from traveling a lot, looking at the world with different eyes. The writer had few friends, so he spent all his free time at work.

The work of Leo Tolstoy did not pass without a trace. In his article "The First Step" he proved the sequence of acquiring virtues. He believed that temperance should have been the first virtue. And it doesn’t matter what, the main thing is to abstain and try to overcome your desires. He himself forbade himself elementary things: to sit for a long time reading books, to think a lot and travel. However, all this could be noticed throughout the unusual life of the writer.

The children of Leo Tolstoy positively evaluated his work. His daughter Tatyana joined the teachings and helped the writer defend the foundations of the new teaching. Tatyana Lvovna wrote a collection that is connected with the doom of philosophy and self-knowledge. The article was published by the Posrednik publishing house. Youngest daughter Tolstoy translated the book Ethics of Food from English into Russian.

Leo Tolstoy had 13 children, many of them died in infancy. All children are from his wife Sofya Andreevna Bers. They got married when Sophia was only 17 years old, and Leo Tolstoy was in his forties. However a big difference age did not interfere with their family happiness. The wife became for the writer a vital support and assistant in his work. She rewrote, reread and corrected his texts, helped to shape the phrases and thoughts of the works.

Leo Tolstoy was a vegetarian. In this regard, the Tolstoy family was divided into two parts. On the one hand - the wife Sofya Tolstaya, who was against her husband's vegetarian beliefs, on the other - the daughters who supported their father. The writer believed that soon everyone would give up meat and be happy. So he thought until his death, but his beliefs did not materialize.

Leo Tolstoy was a difficult person, like all geniuses. However, he left a great legacy of Russian literature - his immortal and famous works.

Born on August 26 (September 9), 1828 in the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, (now a museum-estate in the Tula region) in one of the most distinguished Russian noble families. The distant ancestor of Leo Nikolayevich, Pyotr Alekseevich Tolstoy, an associate of Peter the Great, was a cruel, treacherous and power-hungry nobleman, a man of great statesmanship and great willpower. For services to the king, he was granted the title of count. On the maternal side, Lev Nikolayevich belonged to the ancient family of the Volkonsky princes. Belonging to the aristocracy throughout his life largely determined the behavior and thoughts of Tolstoy. In his youth and in his mature years, he thought a lot about the special vocation of the old Russian nobility, which preserves the ideals of naturalness, personal honor, independence and freedom. In his declining years, he began to be burdened by his privileged position and way of life, unlike the life of the working, common people.

The first years of Tolstoy's life were spent on the estate of his parents, Yasnaya Polyana, not far from the city of Tula. Very early, at the age of one and a half years, he lost his mother Maria Nikolaevna, an emotional and determined woman. Tolstoy knew many family stories about his mother. Her image was fanned for him by the brightest feelings. Father, Nikolai Ilyich, a retired colonel, was friends with the Decembrists Isleniev and Koloshin. He was distinguished by pride and independence in relations with government officials. For Tolstoy the child, his father was the embodiment of beauty, strength, passionate, reckless love for the joys of life. From him he inherited a passion for dog hunting, the beauty and excitement of which many years later Tolstoy expressed on the pages of the novel. War and Peace in the description of the persecution of the wolf by the hounds of the old Count of Rostov.

Warm and touching memories of childhood were associated with Tolstoy and with his older brother Nikolenka. Nikolenka taught little Levushka unusual games, told him and other brothers stories about universal human happiness.

In Tolstoy's first story Childhood its hero Nikolenka Irteniev, who is in many ways biographically and mentally close to the author, speaks of the early years of his life: “Happy, happy, irrevocable time of childhood! How not to love, not to cherish the memories of her? These memories refresh, elevate my soul and serve as a source of the best pleasures for me. These words could be said about his childhood and the author of the story.

In 1837 the Tolstoy family moved from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow. A serene, joyful childhood is over. In the summer of this year, the father unexpectedly dies, and their aunt, the father's sister Alexander Ilyinichna Osten-Saken, becomes the guardian of the orphaned children. She died four years later. The Tolstoys moved to Kazan, where another aunt, Pelageya Ilyinichna Yushkovskaya, lived.

Tolstoy spent his youth in Kazan. Here in 1844 he entered the philosophical faculty of the university. He studied unsystematically, skipped lectures and as a result was not allowed to take transfer exams. Having not received admission to pass the exam in history, in 1845 he transferred to another faculty - law. But history was also taught at this faculty, the lessons of which seemed boring and unpleasant to him. He starts skipping lectures on history again. He indulged with all passion in secular amusements and revels. At this time, he treated with contempt people who were not secular, not aristocrats. Brother Sergei called him "a trifling fellow." But not only secular amusements fascinated Tolstoy. He thought a lot about the fate of mankind, about the place of science in life. His dislike of history is no evidence of narrow-mindedness. Once, a student Tolstoy remarked in a conversation with an interlocutor: “History ... is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, interspersed with a mass of unnecessary numbers and proper names ...”. In the sciences, the young Tolstoy sought, first of all, practical meaning. He was not interested in knowledge that could not be applied in everyday life. It is this kind of “useless” history that seems to him. Such a view of science in general is characteristic of many people of the new era, whose worldview was formed in the 1840s.

The sharpness and independence of Tolstoy's judgments persisted throughout his life. And the denial of traditional historical science with new force appeared in the 1860s in the novel War and Peace.

April 12, 1847 Tolstoy, disappointed in university education, filed a petition for expulsion from the university. He went to Yasnaya Polyana, hoping to try himself in a new field - to improve the life of his serfs. Reality shattered his plans. The peasants did not understand the master, refused his advice and help. Tolstoy for the first time acutely felt the huge, insurmountable abyss separating him - the landowner, the master - and the common people. Social and cultural barriers between the educated class and the people became one of the constant themes of Tolstoy's fiction and articles.

He described his first unsuccessful experience of managing a few years later in the story Morning of the landowner(1856), whose hero Nekhlyudov is endowed with the features of Tolstoy himself.

Returning from Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy spends several years in St. Petersburg and Moscow. He analyzes in detail his actions and experiences in diaries, strives to develop a program of behavior, achieve success in various sciences and spheres of life, in his career. His artistic prose grows out of introspection in his diaries. Tolstoy in his diaries of 1847-1852 carefully records various experiences and thoughts in their complex and contradictory chains. He coldly analyzes the manifestation of selfish moods in high and pure feelings, traces the movement, the flow of one emotional state into another. Self-observations alternate with descriptions of the appearance, gestures and character of acquaintances, with reflections on how to create a literary work. Tolstoy focuses on the experience of psychological analysis of the sentimentalist writers of the 18th century. L. Stern and J.-J. Rousseau, learns the methods of revealing experiences in the novel by M.Yu. Lermontov Hero of our time. In March 1851 Tolstoy writes History of yesterday- a passage in which he describes his feelings in detail. It's not easy anymore diary entry, but a work of art.

In April 1851 he went to the Caucasus, where there was a war between Russian troops and Chechens. In January 1852 he entered military service in the artillery. Participates in battles and works on the story Childhood. Childhood was published under the title Story of my childhood(this name belonged to Nekrasov) in the 9th issue of the Sovremennik magazine for 1852 and brought Tolstoy big success and the glory of one of the most talented Russian writers. Two years later, also in the 9th issue of Sovremennik, a continuation appears - the story adolescence, and in the 1st issue for 1857 the story was published Youth, which completed the story of Nikolai Irteniev - the hero Childhood And adolescence.

originality Childhood And adolescence the writer and critic N. Chernyshevsky subtly noticed in the article Childhood and adolescence. Military stories c. Tolstoy(1856). He called the distinguishing features of Tolstoy's talent "deep knowledge of the secret movements of mental life and direct purity of moral feeling." Tolstoy's three stories are not a consistent story of the upbringing and maturation of the protagonist and narrator, Nikolenka Irteniev. This is a description of a number of episodes of his life - childhood games, the first hunt and the first love for Sonechka Valakhina, the death of his mother, relationships with friends, balls and studies. What others think is petty, unworthy of attention, and what for others is the real events of Nikolenka's life, occupy an equal place in the mind of the hero-child himself. The resentment against the teacher Karl Ivanovich, who killed a fly over Nikolenka's head with a cracker and woke him up, is experienced by the hero no less sharply than first love or separation from relatives. Tolstoy describes in detail the feelings of the child. Image of feelings in Childhood, adolescence And Youth reminiscent of the analysis of his own experiences in Tolstoy's diaries. The principles of depicting the inner world of characters outlined in the diaries and embodied in these three stories passed into novels. War and Peace, Anna Karenina and many other later works of Tolstoy.

The theme of simplicity and naturalness as the highest value of life and the "dispute" with the "ceremonial", beautiful image of the war is expressed in essays Sevastopol in December (1855), Sevastopol in May(1855) and Sevastopol in August 1855(1856). The essays describe episodes of the heroic defense of Sevastopol from the Anglo-French troops in 1855. Tolstoy himself participated in the defense of Sevastopol and spent many days and nights in the most dangerous place - on the fourth bastion, which was mercilessly fired upon by enemy artillery.

Tolstoy's Sevastopol stories are not a panoramic description of the whole multi-month gigantic battle for the city, but sketches of several days from the life of its defenders. It is in the details: in the depiction of the everyday life of soldiers, sailors, nurses, officers, townspeople - Tolstoy is looking for the true truth of the war.

The key motif of the Sevastopol stories is the unnaturalness and madness of war. In the essay Sevastopol in December Tolstoy does not describe the impressive correctness of the battle, but the terrible scenes of the suffering of the wounded in the hospital. He uses the technique of contrast, sharply pushing the world of the living and beautiful nature with world of the dead- Victims of war. For example, he talks about a child picking wild flowers between decaying corpses and touching with his foot the outstretched hand of a headless dead man.

War and Peace.

November 19, 1855 arrives in St. Petersburg. His name is already covered with glory. Writers and journalists of various trends hoped for cooperation with Tolstoy. But the literary environment, the spirit of literary circles and rivalry pushed Tolstoy away from new acquaintances. Their interests seem to him petty and insignificant, life - fussy and meaningless. Tolstoy took his soul out in revelry with gypsies and in an unrestrained card game. In May 1856 he left St. Petersburg and settled in Yasnaya Polyana.

In the autumn of 1859 he opened a school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana. He studied history with children, gave them topics for compositions. In 1862 the school was closed after a police raid. The reason was the suspicions of the authorities that the students who taught at the Yasnaya Polyana school were engaged in anti-government activities. The writer formulated the conclusions from his activities in the Yasnaya Polyana school in an article with a "scandalous" title: Who should learn to write from whom: the peasant children from us, or us from the peasant children? According to Tolstoy, folk art and culture are not lower, but rather higher than the culture and art recognized in an educated society. Peasant children keep the spiritual purity and naturalness lost in the educated estates. Their education in the values ​​of "high" culture, Tolstoy believes, is hardly necessary. On the contrary, the writer himself, studying with them, found himself in the role not of a teacher, but of a student.

In 1862, he married the daughter of a Moscow doctor, Sophia Andreevna Bers. The wedding was preceded by Tolstoy's doubts about the strength and depth of his feelings, about his ability to bring happiness to his future wife and find peace and joy himself in a new, family life. After the wedding, the young spouses leave for Yasnaya Polyana. On September 25, Tolstoy writes in his diary: "Incredible happiness." Mutual misunderstanding, heavy quarrels, alienation from each other - all this is still in the distant future.

In 1863 Tolstoy published the story Cossacks, which he began working on in the mid-1850s. The story, like many of his other works, is autobiographical. It is based on Caucasian memories, first of all, the story of his unrequited love for a Cossack woman who lived in the Starogladkovskaya village. He chooses the traditional romantic literature plot: the love of a chilled, life-disillusioned runaway hero from the disgusting world of civilization for a “natural” and passionate heroine. A.S. Pushkin's poems were written on this plot. Prisoner of the Caucasus And Gypsies. Gypsy Tolstoy re-read while working on Cossacks. But Tolstoy gives this plot a new meaning. The young nobleman Dmitry Olenin only superficially resembles a romantic hero: his fatigue from life is not deep. He is drawn to the natural simplicity, the elemental life of the Cossacks, but remains alien to them. Interests, upbringing, social status Olenin alienate him from the inhabitants of the Cossack village. The beautiful Cossack Maryana prefers the reckless Cossack Lukashka to him. Olenin eagerly absorbs the simple and wise thoughts of the old Cossack, hunter and former thief Uncle Eroshka: happiness, the meaning of life - in rapture with all its joys, in carnal pleasures. But he will never be able to become as simple, carefree, kind and evil, pure and cynical at the same time as Uncle Eroshka.

From 1856 to 1863 he worked on a novel about the Decembrists. He saw the roots of the events of December 14, 1825 in the events of the Patriotic War of 1812 - the time of the spiritual awakening of the Russian people, the unity of the nobility and ordinary people in the fight against a foreign enemy. Thus the idea for the novel was born. War and Peace. The novel was written and revised during 1863-1869 (published in 1865-1869, some changes were made to the text in the editions of 1873 and 1886).

War and Peace bears little resemblance to a classic novel. It does not have the traditional love triangle, love or social conflict as the basis of the plot. Traditionally, the key elements of a novel - the climax or denouement - at the time were usually the duel, marriage, or death of the characters. Meanwhile, the marriage of one of the main characters, Pierre Bezukhov, to the empty and immoral secular beauty Helen Kuragina has little effect on the subsequent events of his life. Pierre's duel with his lover Helen Dolokhov is not the spring of action. Another beloved Tolstoy hero, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, dies, and the story continues. Pierre marries Natasha Rostova. But the novel ends not with a description of their wedding, but with a seemingly random scene - an image of the dream of Nikolenka, the son of Prince Andrei. In this dream, two main characters, Prince Andrei and Pierre Bezukhov, united in one person, and the dream portends the disasters of Pierre, the future Decembrist. This strange, unusual novel has an open ending - the future of the family of Pierre and Natasha is unknown and only vaguely guessed. Not external changes in the fates of the heroes, but their spiritual evolution, their moral quests constitute the true content War and peace.

Two main lines War and peace- the story of two friends, Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky. They are united by the image of the young Countess Natasha Rostova - the bride of Prince Andrei, later, after his death - the wife of Pierre. Pierre and especially Prince Andrei go through a passion for Napoleon. Prince Andrei dreams of great glory. During the battle with Napoleon's army at Austerlitz, picking up the falling banner, he rushed towards the enemy, wanting to drag the soldiers along with him. Suddenly, he is severely injured. He falls to the ground and sees the blue sky high above him. This sky for Prince Andrei becomes a symbol of the highest divine harmony and the true greatness of life. He begins to see clearly, frees himself from spiritual blindness: “How quiet, calm and solemn, not at all like I was running ... clouds are crawling across this high, endless sky not at all like that. How could I not have seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I finally found out. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deceit, except for this endless sky. Andrei Bolkonsky comprehends at this moment all the lies of Napoleonic greatness and his vain aspirations. images of nature in War and peace- symbols of higher harmony, revelation about the truth of the world. They are opposed to the vanity, selfishness, baseness of the false life of people (first of all - people high society), alien spiritual aspirations. The rebirth of the devastated Prince Andrei, who has lost the meaning of existence, who has lost his wife, symbolizes an old withered oak, which sprouts fresh young shoots in spring. Captured by the French, having experienced the horror of execution, Pierre Bezukhov comprehends in captivity that his main, not subject to anyone, his main value is his immortal soul. This liberating feeling comes to Pierre when he contemplates the night starry sky. The beauty of life is embodied for heroes War and peace- Pierre and Prince Andrei - and in the image of a truly poetic and sincere Natasha Rostova. Accidentally heard on a moonlit night in the Otradnoye estate, the enthusiastic Natasha's conversation with her cousin Sonya returns the happiness of youth and immediacy of feelings to Prince Andrei.

A feature of Tolstoy's favorite heroes is the ability for spiritual growth. Both Pierre and Prince Andrei are freed from false ideas through communication with ordinary Russian people. For Prince Andrei, this is Captain Tushin and artillery soldiers subordinate to him, whom he met in the battle with Napoleon at Shengraben. For Pierre, the highest value of simplicity is revealed by the soldiers he sees on the Borodino field. The soldier Platon Karataev helps Pierre understand that the meaning of life is in itself, in its simple and natural joys, in intuitive trust in life, in the humble acceptance of the misfortunes and joys that fall to a person.

Naturalness in the novel is opposed to false, superficial life. Natasha Rostova is simple and natural - a young "countess", selflessly performing a Russian folk dance. Russian soldiers are simple, alien to acting and falsehood, performing feats in an everyday way, without thoughts of glory. The Russian commander Kutuzov is simple, personifying, like Platon Karataev, the fullness of the acquired meaning of life. Both Andrei and Pierre are moving towards liberation from petty and selfish feelings. Andrei, mortally wounded at Borodino, acquires infinite love for all people, and then, on the eve of his death, complete detachment from all earthly worries and unrest, supreme peace. Pierre finds peace and happiness in a quiet family life with Natasha.

These characters are opposed by the poseur Napoleon, who enthusiastically plays the role of a "great man". He is reminiscent of numerous "Napoleons" and "Napoleons" - the Russian Emperor Alexander I, the dignitary Speransky, the maid of honor Anna Sherer, the Kuragin family, the careerist Boris Drubetskoy playing love and the prudent Julie Karagina and many others. These characters are endowed with an exaggerated idea of ​​their own meaning, they are internally empty and insensitive, they thirst for fame, purely carnal passion, they care about a career, they like to talk beautifully and a lot. But they do not know love for their neighbor, they do not feel the higher meaning of being.

In the novel, historical scenes and scenes of private, family life are equalized in their meaning. Tolstoy describes in equal detail the Battle of Austerlitz, the Battle of Borodino, the military council of the Russian army headquarters in Fili and the first ball of Natasha Rostova, the hunt of the old Count Rostov and the conversations of Pierre and Natasha about the health of children. "Historical" chapters in War and peace alternate with "family". Tolstoy perceives what is happening precisely from the point of view of a private, "foreign" person, and not from the point of view of a commander or statesman. So, the battle of Borodino was seen through the eyes of a civilian - Pierre Bezukhov, who knows nothing about military science. In Tolstoy's view, private, family life ordinary people- the same historical event, worthy of the attention of a historian and writer no less than the negotiations of kings and diplomats or military victories.

The combination of "family" chapters with a detailed description of historical events, the conjugation of several storylines, the inclusion of many dozens of characters in his text have become features that are completely new for Tolstoy's contemporary novel. Later researchers called War and peace epic novel.

In historical and philosophical chapters War and peace Tolstoy reveals his understanding of the meaning and laws of history. In his opinion, historical events are determined by the coincidence of many reasons, and therefore people cannot understand the patterns of history. Tolstoy fiercely and caustically argues with the opinion about the decisive role of great people - kings, generals, diplomats - in history. The higher a person's place in society and in the state, the greater the number of circumstances he must take into account, he notes. A truly great man does not interfere in the mysterious, incomprehensible course of history. He only feels its laws with his heart and seeks to promote the course of events. That is exactly what Kutuzov is in the image of Tolstoy, not caring about military plans, behaving supposedly passive and absent-minded on the eve of decisive battles. That is why, the writer convinces, the winner is Kutuzov, and not Napoleon, who carefully developed military plans, but did not feel the hidden course of events, having forgotten that moral correctness in the war of 1812 was on the side of the Russians. Tolstoy rejected historical science, considering it quackery. He admitted that the movement of history is determined not by the will of people, but by Providence, Fate.

Anna Karenina.

In 1877 Tolstoy finished his second novel - Anna Karenina(published 1876–1877). His main character, Anna Karenina, is a subtle and conscientious nature, she is connected with Count Vronsky by a real, strong feeling. Anna's husband, a high-ranking official Karenin, seems soulless and callous, although he is capable of high, truly human, kind feelings. Tolstoy creates circumstances that seem to justify Anna. She is open and honest, does not hide her relationship with Vronsky and seeks to achieve a divorce from her husband. Nevertheless, Tolstoy apparently condemns Anna. The retribution for betrayal of her husband is the heroine's suicide, while her death, according to the author's intention, is a manifestation of divine judgment. No wonder Tolstoy chose the words of God from the biblical book of Deuteronomy in the Church Slavonic translation as the epigraph to the novel: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” In addition, according to Tolstoy, not only Anna deserves the highest judgment, but also other characters who have committed a sin - first of all, Vronsky. Anna's fault for Tolstoy is in evading the destiny of his wife and mother. Communication with Vronsky is not only a violation of marital duty. It leads to the destruction of the Karenin family: their son Seryozha is now growing up without a mother, and Anna and her husband are fighting each other for their son. Anna's love for Vronsky, according to Tolstoy, is not a lofty feeling in which a spiritual principle prevails over physical attraction, but a blind and destructive passion. Her symbol is a furious blizzard, during which Anna and Vronsky explain. The novel combines three storylines - the stories of three families. They are both similar and different at the same time. Anna chooses love, ruining her family. Dolly, the wife of her brother Stiva Oblonsky, for the sake of the happiness and well-being of her children, reconciles with her husband who cheated on her. Konstantin Levin, by marrying Dolly's young and charming sister, Kitty Shcherbatskaya, seeks to create a spiritual and pure marriage in which husband and wife become a single, similarly feeling and thinking being. On this path, temptations and difficulties lie in wait for him. The story of Levin's marriage to Kitty, their marriage, and Levin's spiritual quest is autobiographical. In many ways, she reproduces episodes of the marriage and family life of Lev Nikolaevich and Sofya Andreevna.

A distinctive artistic feature of the novel is the repetition of situations and images that play the role of predictions and foreshadowings. Anna and Vronsky meet at the railway station. At the moment of the first meeting, when Anna accepted a sign of attention from a new acquaintance, the train coupler was crushed by the train. An explanation of Vronsky and Anna also takes place at the railway station. Image railway correlates in the novel with the motives of passion, mortal threat, cold and soulless metal. Anna's death and Vronsky's guilt are foreseen in the horse racing scene, when Vronsky, due to his awkwardness, breaks the back of the beautiful mare Frou-Frou. The death of the horse, as it were, portends the fate of Anna. Anna's dreams are symbolic, in which she sees a man working with iron. His image echoes the images of railway employees and is fanned by threat and death.

IN Anna Karenina Tolstoy repeatedly uses the technique of internal monologue, describing chaotic, arbitrarily changing observations, impressions of the surrounding world and the thoughts of the heroine.

A crisis. Late art.

In the second half of the 1860s - in the 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a painful spiritual crisis. In 1869 he went to look at the estate in the Penza province, which he hoped to buy at a profit. On the way I spent the night in an Arzamas hotel. He fell asleep, but suddenly woke up in horror: it seemed to him that he was about to die.

Tolstoy described his feelings in an unfinished story Diary of a Madman, on which he worked in 1885-1886. The fear of death, the feeling of emptiness and the meaninglessness of life haunted Tolstoy for several years. He tried to seek consolation in philosophy, in the Orthodox faith and in other religions. But he received neither from philosophers nor from theologians an answer understandable and close to him about the meaning of life. Philosophy and existing religions seemed empty and unnecessary to Tolstoy. He repeatedly had thoughts of suicide.

The crisis was overcome at the turn of the 1870s–1880s. Tolstoy comes to recognize the extra-rational, intuitive popular religiosity as the only answer to the question of the meaning of life. In simplification, in likening himself to people from the people, to peasants, he saw the destiny and duty of the nobles, intellectuals - everyone who belongs to the privileged classes. At the same time, he did not accept and did not understand the popular belief in the miraculous and otherworldly. The new faith taught by Tolstoy in his religious-philosophical writings of the 1880s and later was primarily a moral teaching. God for Tolstoy is the highest, pure beginning in the human soul, the embodiment of a moral principle. Existing Christian religions Orthodoxy, in particular, Tolstoy considered perverting the spirit and essence of the commandments, the dogma of Christ. He could not accept the non-rational, super-rational in theology (church dogmas). He reproached the church for reconciling with violence or even for justifying violence. According to Tolstoy, any violence is unacceptable in human society. The overcoming of evil, victory over it and the realization of the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood are possible only through the moral perfection of each person. About overcoming the spiritual crisis and about my new faith Tolstoy told in confessions(written 1879–1882, published 1884).

Tolstoy rethought his entire life. He comes to the conclusion that only the life of the common people is close to moral truths. In the article What is art?(1898) he rejects everything in world culture created by people from the ruling estates and classes. According to Tolstoy, the only true function of art is to give "knowledge of the difference between good and evil", and this function is fully performed only by art created by the common people. Poverty and suffering of the destitute were painfully experienced by Tolstoy. He was one of the organizers of public assistance to the starving peasants in 1891. Personal labor, primarily physical, the rejection of wealth, from property acquired through the work of others, he considers necessary for wealthy people. He wrote about this in a publicist work So what are we to do?, on which he worked in 1882–1886. Tolstoy came to the conclusion that private ownership of land is unnatural, that a state that resorts to violence and cruel punishments should not exist.

In 1908, he learned about the execution by hanging in the city of Kherson of twelve peasants who participated in actions against the landowners and responded to the incident with an article. I can't be silent.

The ideas of the late Tolstoy are reminiscent of socialist teaching. But unlike the socialists, he was a staunch opponent of the revolution. And he saw the path to human happiness, first of all, not in social and economic changes, but in the moral self-improvement of each person. Moderation of desires, a modest life, alien to luxury, liberation from passions, restriction or suppression of sexual desire - such, according to Tolstoy, should be moral guidelines.

The position of the late Tolstoy is the position of a prophet, a debunker of social and state untruth, proclaiming the doctrine of universal brotherly love and labor. Tolstoy, a publicist and teacher of life, gained immense fame not only in Russia, but throughout the world. Yasnaya Polyana becomes a place of pilgrimage: people from different classes, from many countries come to Tolstoy for advice. On February 22, 1901, the Synod, the highest church body in Russia at that time, issued a ruling on excommunication of Tolstoy from the church, pointing to the anti-Orthodox spirit of Tolstoy's teachings. But the excommunication did not shake Tolstoy's exceptional influence on Russian society. In the south of Russia, his followers - the Tolstoyans - created agricultural communes, lived, working the land together.

In the work of the late Tolstoy, the desire for simplicity of style and direct edification were clearly manifested. He created numerous works written in imitation of folk legends and fairy tales, in which he expressed his understanding of the teachings of Christ, ideas about a worthy and righteous life and about an ideal society.

The perversion, irregularity of people's lives, the structure of society - the main theme of the work of the late Tolstoy. In the story Father Sergiy(Tolstoy worked on it in the 1890s, published after his death in 1911) depicts the life story of Prince Stepan Kasatsky, becoming a monk Sergius, an extremely proud man, who comes through the temptation of fame to the simple humble life of a poor wanderer. In the story Kreutzer Sonata(1887-1889) Tolstoy presented sexual love between a man and a woman as a base, unworthy feeling. In a play Living Dead(1900, published posthumously, in 1911) the author focuses on the abnormality of laws and authorities that force spouses who have fallen out of love and are ready to part with each other to continue their life together. The protagonist of the play, Fedya Protasov, feels the emptiness of the surrounding society and finds a way out in drunken revelry. The desire to untie the tangled knot of relations with his abandoned wife Lisa and with her honest, but limited and not understanding Protasov Viktor Karenin, who loves her, leads the protagonist to suicide.

in the story Strider(1885, first version - 1864-1865) the ugliness of relations prevailing among people is exposed thanks to a special technique: everything that happens is depicted in the perception of the horse - gelding Kholstomer. The story is built on a contrast: the tragic life of the wise Kholstomer and the story of the senseless existence of his former owner, the depraved and selfish Prince Serpukhov.

The epiphany of the hero, moral, spiritual transformation on the verge of death - the plot of the stories Death of Ivan Ilyich(1881–1882, 1884–1886, published 1886) and Owner and worker(1894–1895). The terminally ill senior official Ivan Ilyich is convinced of how empty his life was, in which he followed the same rules and habits as other people of his circle. The story is built on the contrast of Ivan Ilyich's new ideas about life and the opinions characteristic of his family and colleagues. The hero of the second story, the owner of the inn, greedy and alien to reproaches of conscience, Brekhunov, unexpectedly for himself, saves his worker Nikita at the cost of his life.

From 1889 to 1899 Tolstoy worked on his last novel - resurrection. At the heart of the plot Sunday - the moral revival of the wealthy nobleman Dmitry Ivanovich Nekhlyudov and the prostitute Katyusha Maslova, whom Nekhlyudov had once seduced. IN resurrection Tolstoy renounces his favorite technique - the depiction of the characters' experiences - the "dialectics of the soul". The description of the complex movement of contradictory experiences is replaced by direct judgments-assessments by Nekhlyudov of himself and the people around him. Tolstoy describes a paradoxical, "inverted" situation: Nekhlyudov, guilty of the moral fall of Katyusha Maslova, turns out to be her legal judge. He is among the jurors who decide on the guilt of Maslova (Maslova is suspected of being involved in the poisoning of a merchant-visitor of a brothel).

Tolstoy depicts a whole gallery of characters from different classes - dignitaries, criminals, revolutionaries. The author of the novel acts as a ruthless judge of the modern social and state structure.

In 1896-1904 Tolstoy wrote the story Hadji Murad(first published posthumously, in 1912). Its plot is the story of the Chechen Hadji Murad going over to the side of Tsar Nicholas I, who is eager to take revenge on Imam Shamil, who fought against the Russian troops. Unlike other later works of Tolstoy, in Hadji Murate there is no obvious morality of the author. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Tolstoy did not want to publish this story. Hadji Murad is a type of "natural hero" who attracted the attention of the still young Tolstoy. The desire for freedom is his main feature. Negative qualities are not alien to Hadji Murad. But he, for all his treachery, is simple-hearted and in this respect is opposed to two rulers-enemies - the hypocritical Nicholas I and Shamil. Tolstoy resorts to the method of exposing the abnormality, false life and customs of the Russian society and court, depicting them through the perception of Hadji Murad, who notices everything strange, unnatural. The story is built on the reception of semantic roll call of events. The manners at the court of Nicholas I and Shamil are similar. The story of Hadji Murad, the victim of the deceit of the Russian Tsar and his entourage, is correlated with the fate of the unfortunate Russian soldier Avdeev.

Since the beginning of the 1880s, mutual alienation has been growing in relations between Tolstoy and his wife and sons. Tolstoy was tormented and ashamed of the wealth he possessed. The discord between the doctrine calling for the renunciation of wealth and his own behavior was unbearably difficult for him. In the 1880s, a conflict arose between Tolstoy and Sofya Andreevna over property and income from publications of the writer's works. On May 21, 1883, he gave his wife a full power of attorney to manage all property affairs, two years later he divided all his property between his wife, sons and daughters. He wanted to distribute all his property to those in need, but he was stopped by his wife's threat to declare him insane and establish guardianship over him. Sofia Andreevna defended the interests and well-being of the family and children. Tolstoy granted all publishers the right to freely publish all his works published after 1881 (Tolstoy considered this year the year of his own moral turning point). But Sofya Andreevna demanded the privilege for herself to publish her husband's collected works. On July 22, 1910, Tolstoy made a will in which he granted all publishers the right to publish his works, both written after 1881 and earlier. The new will strained relations with his wife. Feeling the impossibility of maintaining peace in the family and wanting to fully follow the ideal of simplification and working life, Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana at five o'clock in the morning on October 28, 1910, together with his doctor D.P. Makovitsky. A few days later, Lev Nikolaevich's daughter Alexandra Lvovna joined them. Tolstoy intended to go south, then, most likely, abroad. I thought about starting farming.

At six thirty-five minutes in the evening on October 31, the train bound for Rostov-on-Don arrived at the Astapovo station of the Ryazan-Ural Railway. Tolstoy, who had a fever, was forced to stay at the station chief's house. Doctors diagnosed pneumonia. At six o'clock five minutes November 7 (November 20), 1910 Tolstoy died.

Compositions: Full composition of writings. Anniversary edition: In 90 t. M., 1928–1958; Indexes to the Complete Works of L.N. Tolstoy. M., 1964;

L.N. Tolstoy. Collected Works: In 22 volumes. M., 1978–1985.

Andrey Ranchin

Literature:

Leontiev K.N. About the novels L.N. Tolstoy: Analysis, style, trend. M., 1911 (re-ed.: Questions of Literature), 1988, No. 12
Russian critical literature about the works of L.N. Tolstoy. At 3 o'clock Comp. V.A. Zelinsky. Ed. 2nd. M., 1898–1912
Biryukov P.N. Biography of Leo Tolstoy. Ed. 2nd, add. and correct. M. - P., 1923
Vinogradov V.V. About the language of Tolstoy (50-60s).– Literary heritage, vols. 35–36. M., 1939
Gusev N.N. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy: Materials for a biography from 1828 to 1855. M., 1954
Gusev N.N. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy: materials for a biography from 1855 to 1869. M., 1957
Gusev N.N. Chronicle of the life and work of L.N. Tolstoy. 1828–1890 M., 1958
Gusev N.N. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy: materials for a biography: 1870 to 1881. M., 1963
Shklovsky V.B. Lev Tolstoy. Ed. 2nd. M., 1967
Asmus V.F. Tolstoy's worldview. - In the book: Asmus V.F. Selected philosophical works, vol. 1. M., 1969
Skaftymov A.P. The image of Kutuzov and the philosophy of history in the novel by L.N. Tolstoy« War and Peace". - In the book: Skaftymov A.P. Moral quests of Russian writers. M., 1972
Kamyanov V.I. poetic world epic: About the novel by L. Tolstoy« War and Peace". M., 1978
Opulskaya L.D. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy: Materials for a biography from 1886 to 1892. M., 1979
Bocharov S. « World» V« War and peace". - In the book: Bocharov S. About art worlds. M., 1985
Eikhenbaum B.M. About Literature. M., 1987
Lurie Ya.S. On the historical concept of Leo Tolstoy. - Russian literature. 1989, No. 1
Nabokov V.V. Lev Tolstoy. Per. from English. A. Kurt. - In the book: Nabokov V.V. Lectures on Russian literature. Per. from English. M., 1996
Lesskis. Leo Tolstoy (1852–1869): Second book of the cycle « Pushkin's way in Russian literature". M., 2000
Tolstoy: pro et contra. The personality and work of Leo Tolstoy in the assessment of Russian thinkers and researchers. SPb., 2000
War over « War and peace» : Roman L.N. Tolstoy in Russian criticism and literary criticism. Comp. I.N. Dry. SPb., 2002

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is a great Russian writer, by origin - a count from a famous noble family. He was born on August 28, 1828 in the Yasnaya Polyana estate located in the Tula province, and died on October 7, 1910 at the Astapovo station.

Writer's childhood

Lev Nikolaevich was a representative of a large noble family, the fourth child in it. His mother, Princess Volkonskaya, died early. At this time, Tolstoy was not yet two years old, but he formed an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhis parent from the stories of various family members. In the novel "War and Peace" the image of the mother is represented by Princess Marya Nikolaevna Bolkonskaya.

Biography of Leo Tolstoy in the early years is marked by another death. Because of her, the boy was left an orphan. The father of Leo Tolstoy, a participant in the war of 1812, like his mother, died early. This happened in 1837. At that time the boy was only nine years old. The brothers of Leo Tolstoy, he and his sister were transferred to the upbringing of T. A. Ergolskaya, a distant relative who had a huge influence on the future writer. Childhood memories have always been the happiest for Lev Nikolayevich: family traditions and impressions from life in the estate became rich material for his works, reflected, in particular, in the autobiographical story "Childhood".

Studying at Kazan University

The biography of Leo Tolstoy in his youth was marked by such an important event as studying at the university. When the future writer was thirteen years old, his family moved to Kazan, to the house of the children's guardian, a relative of Lev Nikolaevich P.I. Yushkova. In 1844, the future writer was enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy of Kazan University, after which he transferred to the Faculty of Law, where he studied for about two years: the young man did not arouse keen interest in studying, so he indulged in various secular entertainments with passion. Having filed a letter of resignation in the spring of 1847, due to poor health and "domestic circumstances", Lev Nikolayevich left for Yasnaya Polyana with the intention of studying a full course of legal sciences and passing an external exam, as well as learning languages, "practical medicine", history, Agriculture, geographical statistics, painting, music and writing a dissertation.

Youth years

In the autumn of 1847, Tolstoy left for Moscow, and then for St. Petersburg in order to pass the candidate's exams at the university. During this period, his lifestyle often changed: he studied various subjects all day long, then he devoted himself to music, but wanted to start a career as an official, then he dreamed of becoming a cadet in a regiment. Religious moods that reached asceticism alternated with cards, carousing, trips to the gypsies. The biography of Leo Tolstoy in his youth is colored by the struggle with himself and introspection, reflected in the diary that the writer kept throughout his life. In the same period, interest in literature arose, the first artistic sketches appeared.

Participation in the war

In 1851, Nikolai, the elder brother of Lev Nikolaevich, an officer, persuaded Tolstoy to go to the Caucasus with him. Lev Nikolaevich lived for almost three years on the banks of the Terek, in a Cossack village, leaving for Vladikavkaz, Tiflis, Kizlyar, participating in hostilities (as a volunteer, and then was hired). The patriarchal simplicity of the life of the Cossacks and the Caucasian nature struck the writer with their contrast with the painful reflection of the representatives of an educated society and the life of the noble circle, gave extensive material for the story "Cossacks", written in the period from 1852 to 1863 on autobiographical material. The stories "Raid" (1853) and "Cutting down the forest" (1855) also reflected his Caucasian impressions. They left a mark in his story "Hadji Murad", written in the period from 1896 to 1904, published in 1912.

Returning to his homeland, Lev Nikolaevich wrote in his diary that he fell in love with this wild land, in which "war and freedom" are combined, things that are so opposite in their essence. Tolstoy in the Caucasus began to create his story "Childhood" and anonymously sent it to the journal "Contemporary". This work appeared on its pages in 1852 under the initials L. N. and, along with the later "Boyhood" (1852-1854) and "Youth" (1855-1857), made up the famous autobiographical trilogy. The creative debut immediately brought real recognition to Tolstoy.

Crimean campaign

In 1854, the writer went to Bucharest, to the Danube army, where the work and biography of Leo Tolstoy were further developed. However, soon a boring staff life forced him to transfer to the besieged Sevastopol, to the Crimean army, where he was a battery commander, having shown courage (he was awarded medals and the Order of St. Anna). Lev Nikolaevich during this period was captured by new literary plans and impressions. He began to write "Sevastopol stories", which were a great success. Some of the ideas that arose even at that time make it possible to guess in the artillery officer Tolstoy the preacher of later years: he dreamed of a new "religion of Christ", cleansed of mystery and faith, a "practical religion".

Petersburg and abroad

Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich arrived in St. Petersburg in November 1855 and immediately became a member of the Sovremennik circle (which included N. A. Nekrasov, A. N. Ostrovsky, I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov and others). He took part in the creation of the Literary Fund at that time, and at the same time became involved in the conflicts and disputes of writers, but he felt like a stranger in this environment, which he conveyed in "Confession" (1879-1882). Having retired, in the autumn of 1856 the writer left for Yasnaya Polyana, and then, at the beginning of the next, in 1857, he went abroad, visiting Italy, France, Switzerland (impressions from visiting this country are described in the story "Lucerne"), and also visited Germany. In the same year, in the autumn, Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich returned first to Moscow, and then to Yasnaya Polyana.

Opening of a public school

Tolstoy in 1859 opened a school for the children of peasants in the village, and also helped set up more than twenty such educational institutions in the Krasnaya Polyana region. In order to get acquainted with the European experience in this area and apply it in practice, the writer Leo Tolstoy again went abroad, visited London (where he met with A. I. Herzen), Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium. However, European schools somewhat disappoint him, and he decides to create his own pedagogical system based on the freedom of the individual, publishes study guides and works on pedagogy, applies them in practice.

"War and Peace"

In September 1862, Lev Nikolaevich married Sofya Andreevna Bers, the 18-year-old daughter of a doctor, and immediately after the wedding he left Moscow for Yasnaya Polyana, where he devoted himself entirely to household chores and family life. However, already in 1863, he was again captured by a literary plan, this time creating a novel about the war, which was supposed to reflect Russian history. Leo Tolstoy was interested in the period of our country's struggle with Napoleon in the early 19th century.

In 1865, the first part of the work "War and Peace" was published in the Russian Messenger. The novel immediately drew a lot of responses. The subsequent parts provoked heated debates, in particular, the fatalistic philosophy of history developed by Tolstoy.

"Anna Karenina"

This work was created in the period from 1873 to 1877. Living in Yasnaya Polyana, continuing to teach peasant children and publish his pedagogical views, in the 70s Lev Nikolayevich worked on a work about the life of contemporary high society, building his novel on the contrast of two storylines: family drama Anna Karenina and the domestic idyll of Konstantin Levin, who is close both in psychological drawing, and in convictions, and in the way of life to the writer himself.

Tolstoy strove for an outward nonjudgmental tone of his work, thereby paving the way for a new style of the 80s, in particular, folk stories. The truth of peasant life and the meaning of the existence of representatives of the "educated class" - this is the circle of questions that interested the writer. "Family thought" (according to Tolstoy, the main one in the novel) is translated into a social channel in his creation, and Levin's self-exposures, numerous and merciless, his thoughts about suicide are an illustration of the author's spiritual crisis experienced in the 1880s, which matured while working on it. novel.

1880s

In the 1880s, the work of Leo Tolstoy underwent a transformation. The upheaval in the mind of the writer was also reflected in his works, primarily in the experiences of the characters, in that spiritual insight that changes their lives. Such heroes occupy a central place in such works as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (years of creation - 1884-1886), "Kreutzer Sonata" (a story written in 1887-1889), "Father Sergius" (1890-1898), drama "The Living Corpse" (left unfinished, begun in 1900), as well as the story "After the Ball" (1903).

Publicism of Tolstoy

Tolstoy's journalism reflects his spiritual drama: depicting pictures of the idleness of the intelligentsia and social inequality, Lev Nikolayevich posed questions of faith and life to society and himself, criticized the institutions of the state, reaching the denial of art, science, marriage, court, achievements of civilization.

The new worldview is presented in "Confession" (1884), in the articles "So what shall we do?", "On the famine", "What is art?", "I can't be silent" and others. The ethical ideas of Christianity are understood in these works as the foundation of the brotherhood of man.

Within the framework of the new worldview and humanistic idea of ​​the teachings of Christ, Lev Nikolayevich spoke out, in particular, against the dogma of the church and criticized its rapprochement with the state, which led to the fact that he was officially excommunicated from the church in 1901. This caused a huge uproar.

Novel "Sunday"

Tolstoy wrote his last novel between 1889 and 1899. It embodies the whole range of problems that worried the writer during the years of the spiritual turning point. Dmitry Nekhlyudov, the main character, is a person who is internally close to Tolstoy, who goes through the path of moral purification in the work, eventually leading him to comprehend the need for active goodness. The novel is built on a system of evaluative oppositions that reveal the irrationality of the structure of society (the falsity of the social world and the beauty of nature, the falsity of the educated population and the truth of the peasant world).

last years of life

The life of Leo Tolstoy in recent years was not easy. The spiritual break turned into a break with his environment and family discord. The refusal to own private property, for example, caused dissatisfaction among the writer's family members, especially his wife. The personal drama experienced by Lev Nikolayevich was reflected in his diary entries.

In the autumn of 1910, at night, secretly from everyone, 82-year-old Leo Tolstoy, whose dates of life were presented in this article, accompanied only by his attending physician D.P. Makovitsky, left the estate. The journey turned out to be unbearable for him: on the way, the writer fell ill and was forced to disembark at the Astapovo railway station. In the house that belonged to her boss, Lev Nikolaevich spent last week life. Reports about his health at that time were followed by the whole country. Tolstoy was buried in Yasnaya Polyana, his death caused a huge public outcry.

Many contemporaries arrived to say goodbye to this great Russian writer.