Titans of History

When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself … 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.

Anton Chekhov

Leo Tolstoy is, in the opinion of many, the greatest novelist of all time. His two masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, certainly rank among the finest novels ever written. He was also a skillful writer of short stories and essays, a powerful historian and a mystical philosopher who developed unusual yet influential Christian ideas about the human condition and moral improvement.

The essence of Tolstoy’s greatness is his masterful grasp of human behavior and motivation, which he combined with a natural gift for storytelling and an astonishing breadth and universality of vision. Though he was a deeply complex man, tormented by his failure to live up to his own standards, he had one of the sharpest and most original minds in the history of literature.

Count Leo Tolstoy was born into a prominent aristocratic family on his ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana, some 100 miles south of Moscow. His childhood was upset by the early deaths of both his parents, yet he still remembered it in idyllic terms. He was educated at home by tutors, but when he enrolled at the University of Kazan in 1844, it became apparent that he was neither a willing nor a diligent student, preferring to drink, gamble, womanize and socialize, and he left in 1847 without taking a degree.

He returned to Yasnaya Polyana with the intention of educating himself and improving the lot of his serfs, but his resolve soon weakened. In 1851 he went to the Caucasus, joined the army and used his experiences to write stories such as “Hadji Murat,” his best shorter work. It is a story of nobility, courage and betrayal in the life of a daring Chechen fighter during the thirty-year Russian war to defeat the legendary Chechen/Dagestani commander Imam Shamyl and conquer the northern Caucasus. Tolstoy also served during the combined Anglo-French-Italian siege of the chief Russian naval base in the Crimea, Sebastopol. An eleven-month campaign of appalling slaughter and incompetence ended in 1856 with the Russians sinking their ships, blowing up the garrison and evacuating. The experience was the basis for three literary sketches in which Tolstoy refined his technique of minutely analyzing thoughts and feelings. “The hero of my tale,” the author wrote, “whom I love with all the power of my soul … is Truth.” In 1862 he married Sofia Andreyevna Behrs and again returned to his estate, this time with a plan to teach and learn from the simple peasant children.

Tolstoy’s most productive period came between 1863 and 1877. From 1865 he was working on War and Peace, which he finished in 1869. This vast work is both domestic and political. It consists of three main strands: the monumental struggle of Russia and France, Alexander I versus Napoleon, between 1805 and 1812, particularly the French invasion and retreat from Moscow; the interlinked tales of two aristocratic Russian families, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys; and lengthy essays on history. It is clear that Tolstoy identified himself with the curious, diffident and doubting, but kind, direct and moral character of Pierre Bezukhov.

Tolstoy has an original view of the wars he describes. He portrays Napoleon as a bungling egomaniac, the Russian tsar Alexander I as a man of fine words, obsessed with his own legacy, and the maligned Russian commander Mikhail Kutuzov as a wily old man of war. Combat itself is seen as chaos, without any overall connection or intrinsic structure. The fictional characters all to some extent see life in the same way and find solace only through what would become Tolstoy’s main philosophy: salvation through devotion to family and the tasks of everyday life.

War and Peace

, with its acute understanding of individual motivation and action, may have redefined the novel, but Tolstoy’s next major project, Anna Karenina, was no less influential. Written between 1875 and 1877, it applied the principles of War and Peace to family life. “All happy families resemble each other,” he wrote; “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” At the center of the story lies the tragic affair of Anna with Count Alexei Vronsky, an army officer. In vivid detail Tolstoy paints Anna’s mental contortions under the pressure of society’s hypocrisies and her inner struggles (ultimately in vain) to rationalize her own behavior.