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Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
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| Birth date | September 9, 1828 |
| Death date | November 20, 1910 |
| Place | Yasnaya Polyana, Tula, Russia |
| Alias | Leo Tolstoy |
| Occupation | novelist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifi |
| Category | Author |
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Biography :: Contributions ::
Famous quotes ::
Achievements
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Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate situated in the region of Tula, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in his family. His parents died when he was young, so he was brought up by relatives. Tolstoy studied law and Oriental languages at Kazan University in 1844 until he eventually left the University. Teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." He returned in the middle of his studies to Yasnaya Polyana and spent much of his time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. After contracting heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy accompanied his elder brother to the Caucasus in 1851 and joined the Russian Army. Tolstoy began writing literature around this time.
His conversion from a dissolute and privileged society author to the non-violent and spiritual anarchist of his latter days was brought about by two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860-61, a period when many liberal-leaning Russian aristocrats escaped the stifling political repression in Russia; others who followed the same path were Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that would mark the rest of his life, writing in a letter to his friend V. P. Botkin:
The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.
His European trip in 1860-61 would shape both his political and literary transformation, when he met Victor Hugo, and praised his literary talents after a reading of Hugo's newly finished Les Miserables. One may see the influence of the evocation of battle scenes with a comparison of Hugo's novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace. Tolstoy's political philosophy would be affected notably a March 1861 visit to French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels. Apart from reviewing Proudhon's forthcoming publication, "La Guerre et la Paix", whose title Tolstoy would borrow for his masterpiece, the two men discussed education, as Tolstoy wrote in his educational notebooks:
If I recount this conversation with Proudhon, it is to show that, in my personal experience, he was the only man who understood the significance of education and of the printing press in our time.
Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded thirteen schools for his serfs' children, whose ground-breaking libertarian principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay, "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police, but as a direct forerunner to A.S.Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of libertarian education.
On 23rd September 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers (1844-1919), who was 16 years his junior, and together they had thirteen children, five of whom died during in their childhoods.[1] The marriage with Sofia Bers was marked from the outset by Tolstoy on the eve of their marriage giving his diaries to his fiancée. These detailed Tolstoy's sexual relations with his serfs. Despite so, their early marriage life was comparatively blissful and idyllic and allowed Tolstoy much freedom to compose the literary masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina. His late marriage life has been described by A.N.Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history. His relationship with his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical and he sought to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the renunciation of copyright on his earlier worksNovels and fictional works
Tolstoy was one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and many shorter works, including the novellas The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murad. His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes: Dostoevsky thought him the greatest of all living novelists while Gustave Flaubert gushed: "What an artist and what a psychologist!". Anton Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate, wrote: "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature." Later critics and novelists continue to bear testaments to his art: Virginia Woolf went on to declare him "greatest of all novelists", and James Joyce noted: "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!". Thomas Mann wrote of his seemingly guileless artistry—"Seldom did art work so much like nature"—sentiments shared in part by many others, including Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and William Faulkner.
His autobiographical novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), his first publications, tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the differences between him and his peasants. Although in later life Tolstoy rejected these books as sentimental, a great deal of his own life is revealed, and the books still have relevance for their telling of the universal story of growing up.
Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastapol Sketches. His experiences in battle helped develop his pacifism, and gave him material for realistic depiction of the horrors of war in his later work.
His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. The Cossacks (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.
Tolstoy not only drew from his experience of life but created characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection.
War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. Tolstoy's original idea for War and Peace was to investigate the causes of the Decembrist revolt, to which it refers only in the last chapters, from which can be deduced that Andrei Bolkonski's son will become one of the Decembrists. The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. War and Peace (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that Anna Karenina was his first true novel, and it is indeed one of the greatest of all realist novels.
After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and What Then Must We Do? develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Orthodox church in 1901.
""""A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.
And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Boredom: the desire for desires.
But the peasants - how do the peasants die?
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
If you want to be happy, be.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
There is only one time that is important - NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time hat we have any power.
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
We lost because we told ourselves we lost.
We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
What an immense mass of evil must result... from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
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