Who was Leo Tolstoy? The novelist who gave away his fortune

Leo Tolstoy was born on 9 September 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow, the fourth of five children of a Russian nobleman. He inherited the estate at nine when his father died, was raised by relatives, and spent his twenties doing the things Russian aristocratic young men did: gambling, drinking, chasing women, and serving in the military. He fought in the Caucasus and at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War.

Then he became one of the greatest novelists who ever lived.

And then, in his fifties, he decided that fiction was morally worthless, renounced his literary reputation, gave up his property rights, tried to give away his estate, nearly drove his wife to suicide, and died at a railway station while running away from home at the age of eighty-two.

This is an unusual biography.

What made his fiction so extraordinary?#

Tolstoy wrote two of the longest and most ambitious novels in the Western tradition -- War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878) -- and several shorter masterpieces including The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Hadji Murat (written 1896-1904, published posthumously).

What made him extraordinary was the combination of scale and precision. He could write a battle scene convincing enough that military historians cite it, and in the same novel write the interior monologue of a woman dying under a train with a psychological accuracy that matches anything in 20th-century fiction. The critic Isaiah Berlin, in his famous 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, described Tolstoy as "a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog" -- a writer with an almost supernatural range of perceptions who desperately wanted to reduce the world to a single unifying principle.

He was also deeply interested in the peasantry in a way that was unusual for a novelist of his class. His pedagogical experiments at Yasnaya Polyana -- running a school for peasant children using methods decades ahead of mainstream education -- produced genuine results and genuine educational writing.

What was the crisis that changed him?#

In the late 1870s, shortly after finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what he described in A Confession (1882) as a complete spiritual and existential collapse. He could find no reason to continue living. He hid ropes so he would not hang himself. He stopped carrying a gun because he was afraid of using it.

He came through this crisis into a form of Christian anarchism that rejected the Russian Orthodox Church, the state, private property, violence in all forms, and -- eventually -- the literary reputation he had spent decades building. He considered War and Peace and Anna Karenina morally worthless compared to his later didactic writing, a judgment that his readers have almost universally declined to share.

He wrote the Kreutzer Sonata (1889), a novella advocating celibacy even within marriage, which was banned by the Russian government. He wrote Resurrection (1899), a novel advocating radical social reform. He gave the copyright of his earlier works to his wife Sophia, then later tried to give all his property rights to the public domain -- a move that Sophia, who had spent decades managing the family finances and raising their thirteen children, bitterly opposed.

How did he die?#

In October 1910, at the age of eighty-two, Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana in the middle of the night with his physician, unable to bear the conflict with Sophia any longer. He had no destination. He was already ill. He developed pneumonia on the journey and died at Astapovo railway station on 20 November 1910, surrounded by journalists who had followed him and family members who had been summoned.

Sophia was initially refused permission to see him, on the grounds that the excitement might worsen his condition.

What should you read first?#

Anna Karenina is the best starting point for most readers -- shorter than War and Peace, more emotionally concentrated, and with a narrative drive that carries even first-time readers of long 19th-century fiction. For the practical question of how to approach War and Peace specifically, how to read War and Peace without giving up covers the method. For the full comparison of his major works, the best Tolstoy books for first-time readers is the companion piece.

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Further reading#

Anna Karenina is free on Foxing. War and Peace is free on Foxing.

For the significance of Anna's ending, what the ending of Anna Karenina means covers the thematic argument.

Sources#

• A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy: A Biography, W.W. Norton, 1988
• Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953
• Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, 1882 (free, Project Gutenberg)