"The world, perhaps, did not know another artist in whom the eternally epic, Homeric beginning would be as strong as that of Tolstoy. The element of the epic lives in his works, its majestic monotony and rhythm, like the measured breath of the sea, its tart, powerful freshness , its burning spice, indestructible health, indestructible realism"

Thomas Mann

Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 in the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, in the family of a landowner. Tolstoy's parents belonged to the highest nobility, even under Peter I, Tolstoy's paternal ancestors received the title of count. Lev Nikolaevich's parents died early, leaving him only a sister and three brothers. Tolstoy's aunt, who lived in Kazan, took care of the children. The whole family moved in with her.

In 1844, Lev Nikolaevich entered the university at the oriental faculty, and then studied at the law faculty. Tolstoy knew more than fifteen foreign languages back at the age of 19. He was seriously interested in history and literature. Studying at the university did not last long, Lev Nikolaevich left the university and returned home to Yasnaya Polyana. Soon he decides to leave for Moscow and devote himself to literary activity. His older brother, Nikolai Nikolaevich, leaves for the Caucasus, where the war was going on, as an artillery officer. Following the example of his brother, Lev Nikolaevich enters the army, receives an officer's rank and goes to the Caucasus. During the Crimean War, L. Tolstoy was transferred to the active Danube army, fought in the besieged Sevastopol, commanding a battery. Tolstoy was awarded the Order of Anna ("For Courage"), medals "For the Defense of Sevastopol", "In Memory of the War of 1853-1856".

In 1856 Lev Nikolayevich retired. After a while he goes abroad (France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany).

Since 1859, Lev Nikolayevich has been actively engaged in educational activities, opening a school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana, and then contributing to the opening of schools throughout the district, publishing the pedagogical magazine Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy became seriously interested in pedagogy, studied foreign teaching methods. In order to deepen his knowledge in pedagogy, he went abroad again in 1860.

After the abolition of serfdom, Tolstoy actively participated in resolving disputes between landlords and peasants, acting as a mediator. For his activities, Lev Nikolaevich receives a reputation as an unreliable person, as a result of which a search was carried out in Yasnaya Polyana in order to find a secret printing house. Tolstoy's school is closed, the continuation of pedagogical activity becomes almost impossible. By this time, Lev Nikolaevich had already written the famous trilogy "Childhood. Adolescence. Youth.", The story "Cossacks", as well as many stories and articles. A special place in his work was occupied by "Sevastopol stories", in which the author conveyed his impressions of the Crimean War.

In 1862, Lev Nikolaevich marries Sofya Andreevna Bers, the daughter of a doctor who became a long years his faithful friend and assistant. Sofya Andreevna took care of all the household chores, and besides, she became her husband's editor and his first reader. Tolstoy's wife manually rewrote all of his novels before being sent to the editorial office. It is enough to imagine how difficult it was to prepare War and Peace for publication in order to appreciate the dedication of this woman.

In 1873, Lev Nikolayevich finished work on Anna Karenina. By this time, Count Leo Tolstoy became a well-known writer who received recognition, corresponded with many literary critics and authors, and actively participated in public life.

In the late 70s - early 80s, Lev Nikolayevich was going through a serious spiritual crisis, trying to rethink the changes taking place in society and determine his position as a citizen. Tolstoy decides that it is necessary to take care of the welfare and enlightenment of the common people, that a nobleman has no right to be happy when the peasants are in distress. He is trying to start the change from his own estate, from the restructuring of his attitude towards the peasants. Tolstoy's wife insists on moving to Moscow, as the children need to get a good education. From this moment, conflicts in the family begin, since Sofya Andreevna tried to ensure the future of her children, and Lev Nikolaevich believed that the nobility was over and it was time to live modestly, like the entire Russian people.

During these years, Tolstoy wrote philosophical essays, articles, participated in the creation of the Posrednik publishing house, which dealt with books for common people, writes the novels "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "History of the Horse", "Kreutzer Sonata".

In 1889 - 1899 Tolstoy finished the novel "Resurrection".

At the end of his life, Lev Nikolaevich finally decides to break the connection with the well-to-do noble life, is engaged in charity, education, changes the order in his estate, giving freedom to the peasants. Such life position Lev Nikolaevich became the cause of serious domestic conflicts and quarrels with his wife, who looked at life differently. Sofya Andreevna was worried about the future of her children, was against the unreasonable, from her point of view, expenses of Lev Nikolaevich. The quarrels became more and more serious, Tolstoy more than once made an attempt to leave home forever, the children experienced conflicts very hard. The former mutual understanding in the family disappeared. Sofya Andreevna tried to stop her husband, but then the conflicts escalated into attempts to divide property, as well as property rights to the works of Lev Nikolayevich.

Finally, on November 10, 1910, Tolstoy leaves his home in Yasnaya Polyana and leaves. Soon he falls ill with pneumonia, is forced to stop at the Astapovo station (now the Lev Tolstoy station) and dies there on November 23.

Test questions:
1. Tell the biography of the writer, mentioning the exact dates.
2. Explain how the connection between the biography of the writer and his work is manifested.
3. Summarize the biographical data and determine the features of it
creative heritage.

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy(August 28 (September 9), 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire - November 7 (20), 1910, Astapovo station, Ryazan province, Russian Empire) - one of the most widely known Russian writers and thinkers, revered as one of the greatest world writers.

Born in the estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Among the ancestors of the writer on the paternal side is an associate of Peter I - P. A. Tolstoy, one of the first in Russia to receive the title of count. Member of the Patriotic War of 1812 was the father of the writer gr. N. I. Tolstoy. On the maternal side, Tolstoy belonged to the family of the princes Bolkonsky, related by kinship with the princes Trubetskoy, Golitsyn, Odoevsky, Lykov and other noble families. By his mother, Tolstoy was a relative of A. S. Pushkin.
When Tolstoy was in his ninth year, his father took him to Moscow for the first time, the impressions of meeting with which were vividly conveyed by the future writer in the children's essay "Kremlin". Moscow is here called "the greatest and most populous city in Europe", whose walls "saw the shame and defeat of the invincible Napoleonic regiments." The first period of young Tolstoy's life in Moscow lasted less than four years. He was orphaned early, having lost first his mother and then his father. With his sister and three brothers, young Tolstoy moved to Kazan. Here lived one of the father's sisters, who became their guardians.
Living in Kazan, Tolstoy spent two and a half years preparing to enter the university, where he studied from 1844, first at the Oriental Faculty, and then at the Faculty of Law. Studied Turkish and Tatar languages from the famous Turkologist Professor Kazembek. In his mature life, the writer was fluent in English, French and German; read in Italian, Polish, Czech and Serbian; knew Greek, Latin, Ukrainian, Tatar, Church Slavonic; studied Hebrew, Turkish, Dutch, Bulgarian and other languages.
Classes in government programs and textbooks weighed heavily on Tolstoy the student. He became interested in independent work on a historical topic and, leaving the university, left Kazan for Yasnaya Polyana, which he received under the division of his father's inheritance. Then he went to Moscow, where at the end of 1850 he began his writing activity: an unfinished story from the gypsy life (the manuscript has not been preserved) and a description of one day lived ("The History of Yesterday"). Then the story "Childhood" was started. Soon Tolstoy decided to go to the Caucasus, where his older brother, Nikolai Nikolaevich, an artillery officer, served in the army. Entering the army as a cadet, he later passed the exam for a junior officer rank. The writer's impressions of the Caucasian War were reflected in the stories "Raid" (1853), "Cutting the Forest" (1855), "Degraded" (1856), in the story "Cossacks" (1852-1863). In the Caucasus, the story "Childhood" was completed, which was published in 1852 in the journal Sovremennik.

When the Crimean War began, Tolstoy transferred from the Caucasus to the Danube army, which was operating against the Turks, and then to Sevastopol, besieged by the combined forces of England, France and Turkey. Commanding a battery on the 4th bastion, Tolstoy was awarded the Order of Anna and the medals "For the Defense of Sevastopol" and "In Memory of the War of 1853-1856." More than once Tolstoy was presented for the award of the military St. George Cross, but however, he never received "George". In the army, Tolstoy wrote a number of projects - on the reorganization of artillery batteries and the creation of battalions armed with rifled rifles, on the reorganization of the entire Russian army. Together with a group of officers of the Crimean army, Tolstoy intended to publish the magazine "Soldier's Bulletin" ("Military List"), but its publication was not allowed by Emperor Nicholas I.
In the autumn of 1856 he retired and soon went on a six-month trip abroad, visiting France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. In 1859, Tolstoy opened a school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana, and then helped open more than 20 schools in the surrounding villages. In order to direct their activities along the right path, from his point of view, he published the pedagogical journal Yasnaya Polyana (1862). In order to study the setting of school affairs in foreign countries the writer in 1860 went abroad for the second time.
After the manifesto of 1861, Tolstoy became one of the world's mediators of the first call, who sought to help the peasants resolve their land disputes with the landowners. Soon in Yasnaya Polyana, when Tolstoy was away, the gendarmes searched for a secret printing house, which the writer allegedly started after talking with A. I. Herzen in London. Tolstoy had to close the school and stop publishing the pedagogical journal. In total, he wrote eleven articles on school and pedagogy ("On Public Education", "Upbringing and Education", "On Public Activities in the Field of Public Education" and others). In them, he described in detail the experience of his work with students ("Yasnopolyansk school for the months of November and December", "On the methods of teaching literacy", "Who should learn to write from whom, peasant children from us or us from peasant children"). Tolstoy the teacher demanded that the school be closer to life, sought to put it at the service of the needs of the people, and for this to intensify the processes of education and upbringing, to develop Creative skills children.
At the same time, already at the beginning of his creative path, Tolstoy became a supervised writer. One of the first works of the writer were the stories "Childhood", "Adolescence" and "Youth", "Youth" (which, however, was not written). As conceived by the author, they were to compose the novel "Four Epochs of Development".
In the early 1860s for decades, the order of Tolstoy's life, his way of life, is established. In 1862, he married the daughter of a Moscow doctor, Sofya Andreevna Bers.
The writer is working on the novel "War and Peace" (1863-1869). After completing War and Peace, Tolstoy spent several years studying materials about Peter I and his time. However, after writing several chapters of the "Petrine" novel, Tolstoy abandoned his plan. In the early 1870s the writer was again fascinated by pedagogy. He put a lot of work into the creation of the ABC, and then the New ABC. Then he compiled "Books for reading", where he included many of his stories.
In the spring of 1873, Tolstoy began and four years later completed work on a large novel about modernity, naming it by name main character- Anna Karenina.
The spiritual crisis experienced by Tolstoy in the late 1870s - early. 1880, ended with a turning point in his worldview. In "Confession" (1879-1882), the writer speaks of a revolution in his views, the meaning of which he saw in the break with the ideology of the noble class and the transition to the side of the "simple working people."
At the beginning of 1880s. Tolstoy moved with his family from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow, taking care to educate his growing children. In 1882, a census of the Moscow population took place, in which the writer took part. He saw the inhabitants of the city's slums up close and described them terrible life in the article on the census and in the treatise "So what shall we do?" (1882-1886). In them, the writer made the main conclusion: "... You can't live like this, you can't live like that, you can't!" "Confession" and "So what shall we do?" were works in which Tolstoy acted both as an artist and as a publicist, as a deep psychologist and a bold sociologist-analyst. Later, this kind of works - in the genre of journalistic, but including artistic scenes and paintings, saturated with elements of imagery - will take a large place in his work.
In these and subsequent years, Tolstoy also wrote religious and philosophical works: "Criticism of dogmatic theology", "What is my faith?", "Combination, translation and study of the four Gospels", "The kingdom of God is within you". In them, the writer not only showed a change in his religious and moral views, but also subjected to a critical revision of the main dogmas and principles of the teaching of the official church. In the middle of 1880s. Tolstoy and his like-minded people created the Posrednik publishing house in Moscow, which printed books and pictures for the people. The first of Tolstoy's works, printed for the "simple" people, was the story "What makes people alive." In it, as in many other works of this cycle, the writer widely used not only folklore plots, but also the expressive means of oral creativity. Tolstoy's folk stories are thematically and stylistically related to his plays for folk theaters and, most of all, the drama "The Power of Darkness" (1886), which depicts the tragedy of the post-reform village, where centuries-old patriarchal orders collapsed under the "power of money".
In the 1880s Tolstoy's novels "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and "Kholstomer" ("History of a Horse"), "Kreutzer Sonata" (1887-1889) appeared. In it, as well as in the story "The Devil" (1889-1890) and the story "Father Sergius" (1890-1898), the problems of love and marriage, the purity of family relationships are raised.
Based on the social and psychological contrast, Tolstoy's story "The Master and the Worker" (1895) is built, stylistically connected with the cycle of his folk stories written in the 80s. Five years earlier Tolstoy had written for " home performance"The comedy "The Fruits of Enlightenment". It also shows the "owners" and "workers": the noble landowners living in the city and the peasants who came from the hungry village, deprived of land. The images of the first are given satirically, the second author portrays as reasonable and positive people, in some scenes and "serves" them in an ironic light.
All these works of the writer are united by the thought of the inevitable and close in time "decoupling" of social contradictions, of replacing the obsolete social "order". “What the outcome will be, I don’t know,” wrote Tolstoy in 1892, “but that things are coming to it and that life cannot go on like this, in such forms, I am sure.” This idea inspired the largest work of all the work of the "late" Tolstoy - the novel "Resurrection" (1889-1899).
Less than ten years separate Anna Karenina from War and Peace. "Resurrection" is separated from "Anna Karenina" by two decades. And although much distinguishes the third novel from the two previous ones, they are united by a truly epic scope in the depiction of life, the ability to “match” individual human destinies with the fate of the people in the narrative. Tolstoy himself pointed to the unity that exists between his novels: he said that Resurrection was written in the "old manner", referring primarily to the epic "manner" in which War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written. ". "Resurrection" was the last novel in the writer's work.
In the early 1900s Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church by the Holy Synod.
In the last decade of his life, the writer worked on the story "Hadji Murad" (1896-1904), in which he sought to compare "two poles of imperious absolutism" - the European, personified by Nicholas I, and the Asian, personified by Shamil. At the same time, Tolstoy creates one of his best plays - "The Living Corpse". Her hero - a kind soul, soft, conscientious Fedya Protasov leaves the family, breaks off relations with his usual environment, falls to the "bottom" and in the courthouse, unable to bear the lies, pretense, hypocrisy of "respectable" people, shoots himself with a pistol accounts with life. An article written in 1908, "I Can't Be Silent", in which he protested against the repressions of participants in the events of 1905-1907, sounded sharp. The stories of the writer "After the ball", "For what?" belong to the same period.
Burdened by the way of life in Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy more than once intended and for a long time did not dare to leave it. But he could no longer live according to the "together-apart" principle, and on the night of October 28 (November 10) he secretly left Yasnaya Polyana. On the way, he fell ill with pneumonia and was forced to make a stop at the small station Astapovo (now Leo Tolstoy), where he died. On November 10 (23), 1910, the writer was buried in Yasnaya Polyana, in the forest, on the edge of a ravine, where, as a child, he and his brother searched for a "green stick" that kept the "secret" of how to make all people happy.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) - Russian writer, publicist, thinker, educator, was a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Considered one of the world's greatest writers. His works have been repeatedly screened at world film studios, and plays are staged on world stages.

Childhood

Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 in Yasnaya Polyana, Krapivinsky district, Tula province. Here was the estate of his mother, which she inherited. The Tolstoy family had very branched noble and count roots. In the highest aristocratic world, there were relatives of the future writer everywhere. Whom only was not in his relatives - an adventurer and an admiral, a chancellor and an artist, a maid of honor and the first secular beauty, a general and a minister.

Leo's father, Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, was a man with a good education, took part in the foreign campaigns of the Russian military against Napoleon, fell into French captivity, from where he escaped, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. When his father died, solid debts were inherited, and Nikolai Ilyich was forced to get a bureaucratic job. In order to save his frustrated financial component of the inheritance, Nikolai Tolstoy was legally married to Princess Maria Nikolaevna, who was no longer young and came from the Volkonskys. Despite a small calculation, the marriage turned out to be very happy. The couple had 5 children. The brothers of the future writer Kolya, Seryozha, Mitya and sister Masha. The lion was the fourth among all.

After being born last daughter Maria, my mother began to have "delivery fever." She died in 1830. Leo was not even two years old then. What a wonderful storyteller she was. Perhaps this is where such an early love of Tolstoy for literature came from. Five children were left without a mother. Their upbringing had to deal with a distant relative, T.A. Ergolskaya.

In 1837, the Tolstoys left for Moscow, where they settled on Plyushchikha. The older brother, Nikolai, was going to enter the university. But very soon and quite unexpectedly, the father of the Tolstoy family died. His financial affairs were not completed, and the three smallest children had to return to Yasnaya Polyana to be raised by Yergolskaya and his paternal aunt, Countess Osten-Saken A. M. It was here that Leo Tolstoy spent his entire childhood.

The young years of the writer

After the death of Aunt Osten-Saken in 1843, the children were waiting for another move, this time to Kazan under the guardianship of their father's sister P. I. Yushkova. Leo Tolstoy received his primary education at home, his teachers were the good-natured German Reselman and the French tutor Saint-Thomas. In the autumn of 1844, following his brothers, Lev became a student at the Kazan Imperial University. At first he studied at the Faculty of Oriental Literature, later transferred to the Faculty of Law, where he studied for less than two years. He understood that this was absolutely not the occupation to which he would like to devote his life.

In the early spring of 1847, Leo dropped out of school and went to Yasnaya Polyana, which he inherited. At the same time, he began to maintain his famous diary, adopting this idea from Benjamin Franklin, whose biography he was well acquainted with at the university. Just like the wisest American politician, Tolstoy set certain goals for himself and tried with all his might to fulfill them, analyzed his failures and victories, actions and thoughts. This diary went with the writer through his whole life.

In Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy tried to build new relationships with the peasants, and also engaged in:

• learning English;
• jurisprudence;
• pedagogy;
• music;
• charity.

In the autumn of 1848, Tolstoy went to Moscow, where he planned to prepare for and pass his candidate's exams. Instead, a completely different secular life opened up for him with its excitement and card games. In the winter of 1849, Leo moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg, where he continued to lead revelry and a wild lifestyle. In the spring of this year, he began taking exams for a candidate of rights, but, having changed his mind about going to the last exam, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana.

Here he continued to lead an almost metropolitan lifestyle - cards and hunting. Nevertheless, in 1849, Lev Nikolayevich opened a school for the children of peasants in Yasnaya Polyana, where he sometimes taught himself, but mostly the lessons were taught by the serf Foka Demidovich.

Military service

At the end of 1850, Tolstoy began work on his first work, the famous Childhood trilogy. At the same time, Lev received an offer from his older brother Nikolai, who served in the Caucasus, to join the military service. The elder brother was an authority for Leo. After the death of his parents, he became the writer's best and most faithful friend and mentor. At first, Lev Nikolaevich thought about the service, but a large gambling debt in Moscow accelerated the decision. Tolstoy left for the Caucasus and in the autumn of 1851 he entered the service of a cadet in an artillery brigade near Kizlyar.

Here he continued to work on the work "Childhood", which he finished writing in the summer of 1852 and decided to send it to the most popular at that time literary magazine"Contemporary". He signed with the initials "L. N. T.” and attached a small letter along with the manuscript:

“I look forward to your verdict. He will either encourage me to write more or make me burn everything.”

At that time, N. A. Nekrasov was the editor of Sovremennik, and he immediately recognized the literary value of the Childhood manuscript. The work was published and was a huge success.

military life Lev Nikolaevich was too intense:

• more than once he was in danger in skirmishes with the mountaineers commanded by Shamil;
• when the Crimean War began, he transferred to the Danube army and took part in the battle of Oltenitsa;
• participated in the siege of Silistria;
• in the battle of Chernaya he commanded a battery;
• during the assault on Malakhov Kurgan came under bombardment;
• held the defense of Sevastopol.

For military service, Lev Nikolaevich received the following awards:

• Order of St. Anne 4th degree "For Bravery";
• medal "In memory of the war of 1853-1856";
• Medal "For the Defense of Sevastopol 1854-1855"

The brave officer Leo Tolstoy had every chance of a military career. But he was only interested in writing. During the service, he did not stop writing and sending his stories to Sovremennik. The Sevastopol Tales, published in 1856, finally approved him as a new literary trend in Russia, and Tolstoy left military service forever.

Literary activity

He returned to St. Petersburg, where he made close acquaintances with N. A. Nekrasov, I. S. Turgenev, I. S. Goncharov. During his stay in St. Petersburg, he released several of his new works:

• "Blizzard",
• "Youth",
• Sevastopol in August
• "Two Hussars".

But very soon the secular life got sick of him, and Tolstoy decided to travel around Europe. He visited Germany, Switzerland, England, France, Italy. All the advantages and disadvantages he saw, the emotions he received, he described in his works.

Returning from abroad in 1862, Lev Nikolaevich married Sofya Andreevna Bers. The brightest period began in his life, his wife became his absolute assistant in all matters, and Tolstoy could calmly do his favorite thing - composing works that later became world masterpieces.

Family, death and memory

In marriage with his wife and love, Lev Nikolayevich lived for almost 50 years, they had 13 children, five of whom died while still young. There are a lot of descendants of Lev Nikolaevich all over the world. Once every two years they gather in Yasnaya Polyana.

In life, Tolstoy always adhered to his certain principles. He wanted to be as close to the people as possible. He loved very much ordinary people.

In 1910, Lev Nikolaevich left Yasnaya Polyana, setting off on a journey that would correspond to his life views. Only his doctor went with him. There were no specific goals. He went to Optina Hermitage, then to the Shamorda Monastery, then he went to his niece in Novocherkassk. But the writer became ill, after suffering a cold, pneumonia began.

In the Lipetsk region, at the Astapovo station, Tolstoy was removed from the train, taken to the hospital, six doctors tried to save his life, but Lev Nikolayevich quietly answered their proposals: "God will arrange everything." After a whole week of heavy and painful shortness of breath, the writer died at the house of the head of the station on November 20, 1910 at the age of 82.

The estate in Yasnaya Polyana, together with the natural beauty that surrounds it, is a museum-reserve. Three more museums of the writer are located in the village of Nikolskoye-Vyazemskoye, in Moscow and at the Astapovo station. Moscow also has the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy.

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 Nikolaevich: 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 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 himself with passion in various social entertainment. 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 the full course of legal sciences and taking 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 the boring staff life forced him to transfer to the besieged Sevastopol, to the Crimean army, where he was a battery commander, showing courage ( awarded with 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 teaching aids and works on pedagogy, and puts them into 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 his contemporary high society, building his novel on the contrast of two storylines: the family drama of Anna Karenina and the domestic idyll of Konstantin Levin, close and psychological drawing, and by convictions, and by the way of life to the writer himself.

Tolstoy strove for the outward non-judgmental tone of his work, thereby paving the way for the new style of the 80s, in particular, folk tales. 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-disclosures, numerous and merciless, his thoughts about suicide are an illustration of the author’s spiritual crisis experienced in the 1880s, which had 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 him emotional 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, the 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 opposed, in particular, 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"

Mine last novel Tolstoy wrote 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 unreasonable structure of society (the falsity social peace and the beauty of nature, the falsehood of an 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 the last week of his 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.

Do you know Leo Tolstoy? The short and complete biography of this writer is studied in detail during his school years. However, like great works. The first association of every person who hears the name of a famous writer is the novel "War and Peace". Not everyone dared to overcome laziness and read it. And very in vain. This work has earned worldwide fame. This is a classic that everyone should read. educated person. But first things first.

The biography of Leo Tolstoy tells that he was born in the 19th century, namely, in 1828. The surname of the future writer is the oldest aristocratic in Russia. Lev Nikolaevich received his education at home. When his parents died, he moved to the city of Kazan with his sister and three brothers. P. Yushkova became Tolstoy's guardian. At the age of 16, he entered the local university. He studied first at the Faculty of Philosophy, and then at the Faculty of Law. But Tolstoy never graduated from the university. He settled in the Yasnaya Polyana estate - where he was born.

The biography of Leo Tolstoy tells that the next 4 years became years of searching for him. First, he reorganized the life of the estate, then went to Moscow, where social life awaited him. He received the degree of candidate of law at St. Petersburg University, and then got a job - he became an office worker in the noble deputy assembly of Tula.

Biography of Leo Tolstoy describes his trip to the Caucasus in 1851. There he even fought with the Chechens. Episodes of this particular war were later described in various stories and the story "Cossacks". Then Leo passed the exam for a cadet in order to be an officer in the future. And already in this rank in 1854, Tolstoy served in the Danube army, which acted in those days against the Turks.

Lev Nikolaevich began to seriously engage in literary work precisely during a trip to the Caucasus. His story "Childhood" was written there, and then published in the Sovremennik magazine. In the same edition, the story "Boyhood" subsequently appeared.

Leo also fought in Sevastopol during the time there and showed real fearlessness, participating in the defense of the city, which was under siege. For this he was awarded the Order "For Courage". The writer recreated the bloody picture of the war in his Sevastopol Tales. This work made an indelible impression on the entire Russian society.

From 1855 Tolstoy lived in St. Petersburg. There he often talked with Chernyshevsky, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and others. legendary figures. And a year later he retired. Then the writer traveled, he opened a school for the children of peasants on his native estate and even conducted classes there himself. With his help, another two dozen schools were opened nearby. This was followed by a second trip abroad. The works that immortalized the writer's name throughout the world were created by him in the 70s. This, of course, is "Anna Karenina" and the novel "War and Peace" described at the beginning of the article.

The biography of Leo Tolstoy tells that he married in 1862. With his wife, he subsequently raised nine children. The family moved to the capital in 1880.

Leo Tolstoy (biography Interesting Facts reports about it) spent the last years of his life torn apart by intrigues and squabbles in the family over the inheritance that would remain after him. At the age of 82, the writer leaves the estate and goes on a journey, away from the lordly way of life. But his health was too weak for that. On the way, he caught a cold and died. He was buried, of course, in his homeland - in Yasnaya Polyana.

Biography

Origin

Education

Military career

Travel Europe

Pedagogical activity

Family and offspring

The heyday of creativity

"War and Peace"

"Anna Karenina"

Other works

religious quest

Excommunication

Philosophy

Bibliography

Tolstoy's translators

World recognition. Memory

Screen versions of his works

Documentary

Movies about Leo Tolstoy

Gallery of portraits

Tolstoy's translators

Graph Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy(August 28 (September 9), 1828 - November 7 (20), 1910) - one of the most widely known Russian writers and thinkers. Member of the defense of Sevastopol. educator, publicist, religious thinker, whose authoritative opinion provoked the emergence of a new religious and moral trend - Tolstoyism.

The ideas of nonviolent resistance that L. N. Tolstoy expressed in his work “The Kingdom of God is within you” influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Biography

Origin

He came from a noble family, known, according to legendary sources, since 1353. His paternal ancestor, Count Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy, is known for his role in the investigation of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich, for which he was appointed head of the Secret Chancellery. The features of the great-grandson of Peter Andreevich, Ilya Andreevich, are given in War and Peace to the most 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, which did not allow him to serve under Nikolai. A participant in the foreign campaign of the Russian army, including participating in the “battle of the peoples” near Leipzig and being captured by the French, 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. For several years, Nikolai Ilyich had to save money. The negative example of his father helped Nikolai Ilyich develop his own life ideal- private independent life with family joys. To put his frustrated affairs in order, Nikolai Ilyich, like Nikolai Rostov, married an ugly and no longer very young princess from the Volkonsky family; the marriage was happy. They had four sons: Nikolai, Sergei, Dmitry and Lev, and a daughter, Maria.

Tolstoy's maternal grandfather, Catherine's general, Nikolai Sergeevich Volkonsky, had some resemblance to the stern rigorist - the old prince Bolkonsky in "War and Peace", but the version that he served as the prototype of the hero of "War and Peace" is rejected by many researchers of Tolstoy's work. Lev Nikolayevich's mother, similar in some respects to Princess Marya depicted in War and Peace, possessed a wonderful gift for storytelling, for which, with her shyness passed on to her son, she had to lock herself with a large number of listeners who gathered around her in a dark room.

In addition to the Volkonskys, Leo Tolstoy was closely related to some other aristocratic families: the princes Gorchakov, Trubetskoy and others.

Childhood

Born on August 28, 1828 in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province, in the hereditary estate of his mother - Yasnaya Polyana. Was the 4th child; his three older brothers: Nikolai (1823-1860), Sergei (1826-1904) and Dmitry (1827-1856). In 1830 sister Maria (1830-1912) was born. His mother died when he 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, because the eldest son had to prepare to enter the university, but soon his father died suddenly, leaving his affairs (including some litigation 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 her paternal aunt, Countess A. M. Osten-Saken, who was appointed guardian of the children. Here Lev Nikolaevich remained until 1840, when Countess Osten-Saken died and the children moved to Kazan, to a new guardian - the father's sister P. I. Yushkova.

The Yushkovs' house, somewhat provincial in style, but typically secular, was 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 want nothing more for me than for me to have a connection with married woman rien ne forme un jeune homme comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut" (« Confession»).

He wanted to shine in society, to earn the reputation of a young man; but he had no external data for that: he was ugly, as it seemed to him, awkward, and, moreover, he was hampered by natural shyness. Everything that is said in adolescence" and " Youth” about the aspirations of Irtenyev and Nekhlyudov for self-improvement, taken by Tolstoy from the history of his own ascetic attempts. The most diverse, as Tolstoy himself defines them, "thinking" about the main issues of our existence - happiness, death, God, love, eternity - painfully tormented him in that era of life, when his peers and brothers devoted themselves entirely to the cheerful, easy and carefree pastime of the rich and noble people. All this led to the fact that Tolstoy developed "a habit of constant moral analysis", as it seemed to him, "destroying the freshness of feeling and clarity of mind" (" Youth»).

Education

Did his education go at first under the guidance of the French tutor Saint-Thomas? (Mr. Jerome "Boyhood"), who replaced the good-natured German Reselman, whom he portrayed in "Childhood" under the name of Karl Ivanovich.

At the age of 15, in 1843, following his brother Dmitry, he entered the students of Kazan University, where Lobachevsky was a professor at the mathematical faculty, and Kovalevsky was a professor at the Vostochny. Until 1847, he was preparing to enter the Oriental Faculty, the only one in Russia at that time, in the category of Arabic-Turkish literature. At the entrance exams, in particular, he showed excellent results in the obligatory "Turkish-Tatar language" for admission.

Due to a conflict between his family and a teacher of Russian history and German, a certain Ivanov, according to the results of the year, he had poor progress in the relevant subjects 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 Russian history and German continued. The last one was attended by the eminent civil scientist Meyer; Tolstoy at one time became very interested in his lectures and even took on a special topic for development - a comparison of Montesquieu's "Esprit des lois" and Catherine's "Order". Nothing came of this, however. Leo Tolstoy spent less than two years at the Faculty of Law: “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,” Tolstaya writes in her “Materials to biographies of L. N. Tolstoy”.

It was at this time, while in the Kazan hospital, that he began to keep a diary, where, imitating Franklin, he sets himself goals and rules for self-improvement and notes successes and failures in performing these tasks, analyzes his shortcomings and the train of thought and motives for his actions. In 1904, he recalled: “... for the first year I ... did nothing. In my second year, I started working out. .. there was Professor Meyer, who ... gave me a work - a comparison of Catherine's "Instruction" with Montesquieu's "Esprit des lois". ... 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.

The beginning of literary activity

Having left the university, Tolstoy settled in Yasnaya Polyana in the spring of 1847; his activities there are partly described in The Morning of the Landowner: Tolstoy tried to establish relations with the peasants in a new way.

I followed journalism very little; although his attempt to somehow smooth over the guilt of the nobility before the people dates back to the same year when Grigorovich's "Anton Goremyk" and the beginning of Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" appeared, but this is a mere accident. If you were here literary influences, then of a much older origin: Tolstoy was very fond of Rousseau, a hater of civilization and a preacher of a return to primitive simplicity.

In his diary, Tolstoy sets himself a huge number of goals and rules; managed to follow only a small number 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 - in 1849 he opened a school for peasant children for the first time. The main teacher was Foka Demidych, a serf, but L. N. himself often conducted classes.

Having left for St. Petersburg, in the spring of 1848 he began to take an 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 traveled to Moscow, where he often succumbed to the passion for the game, which greatly upset his financial affairs. During this period of his life, Tolstoy was especially passionately interested in music (he played the piano quite well and was very fond of classical composers). Exaggerated in relation to most people, the description of the effect that “passionate” music produces, the author of the Kreutzer Sonata, drew from the sensations excited by the world of sounds in his own soul.

Tolstoy's favorite composers were Bach, Handel and Chopin. In the late 1840s, Tolstoy, in collaboration with his acquaintance, composed a waltz, which he performed in the early 1900s with the composer Taneyev, who made a musical notation of this musical work (the only one composed by Tolstoy).

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 Alberta. Tolstoy had the idea to save him: he took him to Yasnaya Polyana and played a lot with him. 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.

So 4 years passed after leaving the university, when Tolstoy's brother, Nikolai, who served in the Caucasus, came to Yasnaya Polyana and began to call him there. Tolstoy did not give in to his brother's call for a long time, until a big loss in Moscow helped the decision. To pay off, it was necessary to reduce their expenses to a minimum - and in the spring of 1851 Tolstoy hurriedly left Moscow for the Caucasus, at first without any specific goal. Soon he decided to enter the military service, but there were obstacles in the form of a lack of necessary papers that were difficult to obtain, and Tolstoy lived for about 5 months in complete seclusion 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 Starogladovo, on the banks of the Terek, near Kizlyar, as a cadet. With a slight change in detail, she is depicted in all her semi-wild originality in The Cossacks. The same "Cossacks" will give us a picture of the inner life of Tolstoy, who fled from the capital's whirlpool. The moods that Tolstoy-Olenin experienced were of a dual nature: here is a deep need to shake off the dust and soot of civilization and live in the refreshing, clear bosom of nature, outside the empty conventions of urban and, especially, high-society life, here is the desire to heal the wounds of pride, taken out of the pursuit of success in this "empty" way of life, there is also a heavy consciousness of misdeeds against the strict requirements of true morality.

In a remote village, Tolstoy began to write and in 1852 sent the first part of the future trilogy, Childhood, to the editors of Sovremennik.

The relatively late beginning of the career is very characteristic of Tolstoy: he was never a professional writer, understanding professionalism not in the sense of a profession that provides a livelihood, but in a less narrow sense of the predominance of literary interests. Purely literary interests always stood in the background for Tolstoy: he wrote when he wanted to write and the need to speak out was quite ripe, but in ordinary times he socialite, officer, landowner, teacher, mediator, preacher, teacher of life, etc. He never took the interests of literary parties to heart, was far from willing to talk about literature, preferring to talk about issues of faith, morality, public relations. Not a single work of his, in the words of Turgenev, "stinks of literature," that is, it did not come out of a book mood, out of literary isolation.

Military career

Having received the manuscript of Childhood, the editor of Sovremennik Nekrasov immediately recognized its literary value and wrote a kind letter to the author, which had a very encouraging effect on him. He takes up the continuation of the trilogy, and plans for “Morning of the landowner”, “Raid”, “Cossacks” are swarming in his head. Published in Sovremennik in 1852, Childhood, signed with the modest initials L. N. T., was an extraordinary success; the author immediately began to be ranked among the luminaries of the young literary school, along with Turgenev, Goncharov, Grigorovich, Ostrovsky, who already enjoyed loud literary fame at that time. Criticism - Apollon Grigoriev, Annenkov, Druzhinin, Chernyshevsky - appreciated the depth of psychological analysis, the seriousness of the author's intentions, and the bright convexity of realism, despite the veracity of the vividly grasped details real life alien to any kind of vulgarity.

Tolstoy remained in the Caucasus for two years, participating in many skirmishes with the highlanders and being exposed to all the dangers of a military life in the Caucasus. He had the rights and claims to the St. George Cross, but did not receive it, which, apparently, was upset. When the Crimean War broke out at the end of 1853, 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.

Tolstoy lived for a long time on the terrible 4th bastion, commanded a battery in the battle of Chernaya, was in the infernal bombardment during the assault on Malakhov Kurgan. Despite all the horrors of the siege, Tolstoy wrote at that time a combat story from the Caucasian life "Cutting the Forest" and the first of three "Sevastopol stories" "Sevastopol in December 1854". This last story he sent to Sovremennik. Immediately printed, the story was eagerly read by all of Russia and made a stunning impression with a picture of the horrors that befell the defenders of Sevastopol. The story was noticed by Emperor Nicholas; he ordered to take care of the gifted officer, which, however, was impossible for Tolstoy, who did not want to go into the category of the "staff" he hated.

For the defense of Sevastopol, Tolstoy was awarded the Order of St. Anne with the inscription "For Courage" and the medals "For the Defense of Sevastopol 1854-1855" and "In Memory of the War of 1853-1856." Surrounded by the brilliance of fame and, using the reputation of a very brave officer, Tolstoy had every chance of a career, but he “spoiled” it for himself. Almost the only time in his life (except for the “Combining different versions of epics into one” made for children in his pedagogical writings) he indulged in poetry: he wrote a satirical song, in the manner of soldiers, about an unfortunate deed 4 (August 16, 1855, when General Read, having misunderstood the order of the commander-in-chief, imprudently attacked the Fedyukhin heights, the song (Like on the fourth day, it was not easy to take the mountains off us), which offended a number of important generals, had a huge success and, of course, damaged the author. Immediately after the assault on August 27 (8 September) Tolstoy was sent by courier to Petersburg, where he finished Sevastopol in May 1855 and wrote Sevastopol in August 1855.

"Sevastopol stories" finally strengthened his reputation as a representative of a new literary generation.

Travel Europe

In St. Petersburg, he was warmly welcomed both in high-society salons and in literary circles; he became especially close friends with Turgenev, with whom at one time he lived in the same apartment. The latter introduced him to the Sovremennik circle and other literary luminaries: he became on friendly terms with Nekrasov, Goncharov, Panaev, Grigorovich, Druzhinin, Sologub.

“After the hardships of Sevastopol, life in the capital had a double charm for a rich, cheerful, impressionable and sociable young man. Tolstoy spent whole days and even nights on drinking parties and cards, carousing with gypsies” (Levenfeld).

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

Happy life was not slow to leave a bitter aftertaste in Tolstoy's soul, especially since he began to have a strong discord with the circle of writers close to him. As a result, "people got sick of him and he got sick of himself" - 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 attends balls, museums, he admires 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 Rousseau - Lake Geneva. At this time, Albert writes the story and the story Lucerne.

In the interval between the first and second trips, he continues to work on The Cossacks, wrote Three Deaths and Family Happiness. It was at this time that Tolstoy almost died on a bear hunt (December 22, 1858). He has an affair with a peasant woman Aksinya, at the same time he has a need for marriage.

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, and through conversations with specialists. Of the outstanding people of Germany, he was most interested in Auerbach, as the author of the "Black Forest Tales" dedicated to folk life and publisher folk calendars. Tolstoy paid him a visit and tried to get close to him. During his stay in Brussels, Tolstoy met Proudhon and Lelewel. In London he visited Herzen, was at a lecture by 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 in his arms. The death of his brother made a huge impression on Tolstoy.

Pedagogical activity

He returned to Russia shortly after the liberation of the peasants and became a mediator. At that time, they looked at the people as a younger brother who needed to be lifted up; Tolstoy thought, on the contrary, that the people are infinitely higher than the cultural classes, and that the masters must borrow the heights of spirit from the peasants. He was actively engaged in organizing schools in his Yasnaya Polyana and in the entire Krapivensky district.

The Yasnaya Polyana school belongs to the number of original pedagogical attempts: in the era of boundless admiration for the latest German pedagogy, Tolstoy resolutely rebelled against any regulation and discipline in the school; the only method of teaching and education that he recognized was that no method was needed. Everything in teaching should be individual - both the teacher and the student, and their mutual relationship. 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 specific curriculum. The teacher's only job was to keep the class interested. The classes were going great. 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, he began to publish the pedagogical journal Yasnaya Polyana, where again he himself was the main employee. In addition to theoretical articles, Tolstoy also wrote a number of stories, fables and adaptations. Put together, Tolstoy's pedagogical articles made up an entire volume of his collected works. Hidden in a very little-spread special magazine, they at one time remained little noticed. No one paid any attention to the sociological basis of Tolstoy's ideas about education, to the fact that Tolstoy saw in education, science, art and technological advances only facilitated and improved ways of exploiting the people by the upper classes. Not only that: from Tolstoy's attacks on European education and on the concept of “progress”, which was beloved at that time, many seriously concluded that Tolstoy was a “conservative”.

This curious misunderstanding lasted for about 15 years, bringing together with Tolstoy such a writer, for example, as organically opposed to him, as N. N. Strakhov. Only in 1875, N. K. Mikhailovsky, in the article “The Right Hand and Schuytsa of Count Tolstoy”, striking with the brilliance of analysis and foreseeing Tolstoy’s future activities, outlined the spiritual image of the most original of Russian writers in a real light. The little attention that was paid to Tolstoy's pedagogical articles is partly due to the fact that little attention was paid to him at that time.

Apollon Grigoriev had the right to title his article on Tolstoy (Vremya, 1862) "Phenomena of Modern Literature Missed by Our Criticism." Extremely cordially meeting the debits and credits of Tolstoy and "Sevastopol Tales", recognizing in him the great hope of Russian literature (Druzhinin even used the epithet "brilliant" in relation to him), criticism then for 10-12 years, until the appearance of "War and Peace", not only ceases to recognize him as a very important writer, but somehow grows cold towards him.

Among the stories and essays he wrote in the late 1850s are "Lucerne" and "Three Deaths".

Family and offspring

In the late 1850s, he met Sophia Andreevna Bers (1844-1919), the daughter of a Moscow doctor from the Baltic Germans. He was already in his fourth decade, Sofya Andreevna was only 17 years old. On September 23, 1862, he married her, and fullness fell to his lot family happiness. In the person of his wife, he found not only the most faithful and devoted friend, but also an indispensable assistant in all matters, practical and literary. For Tolstoy, the brightest period of his life is coming - an intoxication with personal happiness, very significant thanks to the practicality of Sofya Andreevna, material well-being, an outstanding, easily given tension of literary creativity and, in connection with it, unprecedented fame all-Russian, and then worldwide.

However, Tolstoy's relationship with his wife was not cloudless. Quarrels often arose between them, including in connection with the lifestyle that Tolstoy chose for himself.

• Sergei (July 10, 1863 - December 23, 1947)
• Tatiana (October 4, 1864 - September 21, 1950). Since 1899 she has been married to Mikhail Sergeevich Sukhotin. In 1917-1923 she was the curator of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum Estate. In 1925 she emigrated with her daughter. Daughter Tatyana Mikhailovna Sukhotina-Albertini 1905-1996
• Ilya (May 22, 1866 - December 11, 1933)
• Leo (1869-1945)
• Maria (1871-1906) Buried in the village. Kochety of Krapivensky district. From 1897 married to Nikolai Leonidovich Obolensky (1872-1934)
• Peter (1872-1873)
• Nicholas (1874-1875)
• Barbara (1875-1875)
• Andrei (1877-1916)
• Mikhail (1879-1944)
• Alexey (1881-1886)
• Alexandra (1884-1979)
• Ivan (1888-1895)

The heyday of creativity

During the first 10-12 years after his marriage, he creates "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina". At the turn of this second era of Tolstoy's literary life, there are works conceived back in 1852 and completed in 1861-1862. "Cossacks", the first of the works in which Tolstoy's great talent reached the size of a genius. For the first time in world literature with such clarity and certainty, the difference between the brokenness of a cultured person, the absence of strong, clear moods in him, and the spontaneity of people close to nature was shown.

Tolstoy showed that it is not at all the peculiarity of people close to nature that they are good or bad. It is impossible to call good heroes of the works of the fat dashing horse thief Lukashka, a kind of dissolute girl Maryanka, a drunkard Eroshka. But they cannot be called bad either, because they have no consciousness of evil; Eroshka is directly convinced that "nothing is wrong". Tolstoy's Cossacks are simply living people, in whom not a single spiritual movement is obscured by reflection. "Cossacks" were not evaluated in a timely manner. At that time, everyone was too proud of the “progress” and success of civilization to be interested in how a representative of culture gave in to the power of direct spiritual movements of some semi-savages.

"War and Peace"

Unprecedented success fell to the lot of "War and Peace". An excerpt from a novel entitled "1805" appeared in the "Russian Messenger" in 1865; in 1868, three of its parts were published, followed soon by the other two.

Recognized by critics around the world as the greatest epic work of the new European literature, "War and Peace" is already striking from a purely technical point of view with the size of its fictional canvas. Only in painting can one find some parallel in the huge paintings by Paolo Veronese in the Doge's Palace in Venice, where hundreds of faces are also written out with amazing distinctness and individual expression. In Tolstoy's novel, all classes of society are represented, from emperors and kings to the last soldier, all ages, all temperaments, and throughout the entire reign of Alexander I.

"Anna Karenina"

The infinitely joyful intoxication with the bliss of being is no longer in Anna Karenina, dating from 1873-1876. There is still much gratifying experience in Levin and Kitty's almost autobiographical novel, but there is already so much bitterness in the depiction of Dolly's family life, in the unfortunate end of the love of Anna Karenina and Vronsky, so much anxiety in Levin's spiritual life that in general this novel is already a transition to the third period. literary activity of Tolstoy.

In January 1871, Tolstoy sent a letter to A. A. Fet: “How happy I am ... that I will never write verbose rubbish like “War” again”.

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 are good at dancing the mazurka. I attribute meaning to my very different books (religious ones!)”.

In the sphere of material interests, he began to say to himself: “Well, well, you will have 6,000 acres in the Samara province - 300 heads of horses, and then?”; in the field 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?"; reasoning “about 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 lived by was gone”. The natural result was the thought of suicide.

“I, a happy man, hid the string from me so as not to hang myself on the crossbar between the cabinets in my room, where I was alone every day, undressing, and stopped going hunting with a gun, so as not to be tempted by a too easy way to rid myself of life. I myself did not know what I wanted: I was afraid of life, strove to get away from it and, meanwhile, hoped for something else from it.

Other works

In March 1879, in the city of 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 and epics, of which more than twenty were recorded by Tolstoy, and Tolstoy, if he did not write down the plots, remembered them (these records are printed in vol. XLVIII of the Anniversary edition of Tolstoy's works). Six works written by Tolstoy are based on the legends and stories of Schegolyonok (1881 - “ How people live", 1885 -" Two old men" and " Three elders", 1905 -" Korney Vasiliev" and " Prayer", 1907 -" old man in church"). In addition, Count Tolstoy diligently wrote down many sayings, proverbs, individual expressions and words told by Shchegolyonok.

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 like a playwright.

religious quest

In order to find an answer to the questions and doubts that tormented 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 conducted conversations with priests and monks, went to the elders in Optina Pustyn, read theological treatises. In order to know 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 schismatics, became close to the thoughtful peasant Syutaev, and talked with Molokans and Stundists. Tolstoy also sought the meaning of life in the study of philosophy and in acquaintance with the results of the exact sciences. He made a series of attempts at greater and greater simplification, striving to live a life close to nature and agricultural life.

Gradually, he gives up the whims and comforts of a rich life, does a lot of physical labor, dresses in the simplest clothes, becomes a vegetarian, gives his family all his large fortune, renounces literary property rights. On this soil, an unalloyed pure impulse and striving for moral improvement, the third period of Tolstoy's literary activity is created, hallmark which is the denial of all established forms of state, social and religious life. A significant part of Tolstoy's views could not be openly expressed in Russia and are presented in full only in foreign editions of his religious and social treatises.

No unanimous attitude was established even in relation to Tolstoy's fictional works 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 - that elemental skill that is given only folk tales because they embody the creativity of an entire people. On the contrary, in the opinion of people who are indignant at Tolstoy for turning from an artist into a preacher, these artistic teachings, written with a specific purpose, are grossly tendentious. The high and terrible truth of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, according to fans, which puts this work along with the main works of the genius of Tolstoy, according to others, is deliberately harsh, deliberately sharply emphasizes the soullessness of the upper strata of society in order to show the moral superiority of a simple "kitchen man" Gerasim. The explosion of the most opposite feelings, caused by the analysis of marital relations and the indirect demand for abstinence from married life, in the Kreutzer Sonata made us forget about the amazing brightness and passion with which this story was written. The folk drama "The Power of Darkness", according to Tolstoy's admirers, is 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.

In the last major work, the novel "Resurrection" condemned judicial practice and high society life, caricatured the clergy and worship.

Critics of the last phase of Tolstoy's literary and preaching activity find that his artistic power has certainly suffered from the predominance of theoretical interests, and that creativity is now the only thing Tolstoy needs to propagate his socio-religious views in a generally accessible form. In his aesthetic treatise (“On Art”), one can find enough material to declare Tolstoy an enemy of art: in addition to the fact that Tolstoy here partly completely denies, partly significantly diminishes artistic value Dante, Raphael, Goethe, Shakespeare (at the performance of "Hamlet" he experienced "special suffering" for this "false likeness of works of art"), Beethoven and others, he directly comes to the conclusion that "the more we surrender to beauty, the the more we move away from good.”

Excommunication

Belonging by birth and baptism to the Orthodox Church, Tolstoy, like most representatives of the educated society of his time, in his youth and youth was indifferent to religious issues. In the mid-1870s, he showed an increased interest in the teaching and worship of the Orthodox Church. 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 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 some took the cold and cynical Toporov for a caricature of K. P. Pobedonostsev, the chief procurator of the Holy Synod.

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 cameras-furier magazines, on February 22, Pobedonostsev was with Nicholas II in winter palace and talked to him for about an hour. Some historians believe that Pobedonostsev came to the tsar directly from the Synod with a ready definition.

February 24 (old style), 1901, in the official organ of the Synod "Church Gazette, published under the Holy Governing Senod" was published “Determination of the Holy Synod of February 20-22, 1901 No. 557, with a message to the faithful children of the Orthodox Greco-Russian Church about Count Leo Tolstoy”:

In his Response to the Synod, Leo Tolstoy confirmed his break with the Church: “The fact that I have renounced the Church, which calls itself Orthodox, is absolutely fair. But I denied 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. However, Tolstoy objected to the accusations brought against him in the ruling of the synod: “The resolution of the synod 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 differences 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.

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 Russia with a request to revise the synodal definition; In an informal interview on television, the Patriarch said: “We cannot revise now, because after all, you can revise if a person changes his position.” In March 2009, Vl. Tolstoy expressed his opinion on the meaning of the synodal act: “I studied 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.

Moscow census of 1882. L. N. Tolstoy - participant in the census

The 1882 census in Moscow is famous for the fact that he took part in it great writer Count L. N. Tolstoy. Lev Nikolayevich wrote: “I suggested using the census in order to find out poverty in Moscow and help her with business and money, and 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 for himself one of the most difficult and difficult sections, 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, a few days before the census, Tolstoy began to walk around the site according to the plan that he was given. 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"About the census in Moscow". In this article, he writes:

Despite Tolstoy's declared good intentions of the census, the population was suspicious of this event. On this occasion, Tolstoy writes: “When they explained to us that the people had already learned about the rounds of the apartments and were leaving, we asked the owner to lock the gates, 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.

According to the results of the census, the population of Moscow in 1882 amounted to 753.5 thousand people, and only 26% were born in Moscow, and the rest were “newcomers”. Of the Moscow residential apartments, 57% faced the street, 43% faced the courtyard. From the 1882 census, one can find out that in 63% the head of the household is a married couple, in 23% - the wife, and only in 14% - the husband. The census recorded 529 families with 8 or more children. 39% have servants and most often they are women.

Last years of life. Death and funeral

In October 1910, fulfilling his decision to live his last years in accordance with his views, he secretly left Yasnaya Polyana. He began his last journey at the Kozlova Zasek station; On the way, he fell ill with pneumonia and was forced to make a stop at the small station Astapovo (now Lev Tolstoy, Lipetsk Region), where he died on November 7 (20).

On November 10 (23), 1910, he 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” of how to make all people happy.

In January 1913, a letter was published by Countess Sophia Tolstaya dated December 22, 1912, in which she confirms the news in the press that a funeral was performed at her husband's grave by a certain priest (she denies rumors that he was not real) in her presence. 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 funerals. But if it is unpleasant for those who will bury, then let them bury as usual, but as cheaply and simply as possible.

There is also an unofficial version of the death of Leo Tolstoy, described in exile by I.K. Sursky from the words of a Russian police official. According to her, the writer, before his death, wanted to reconcile with the church and arrived in Optina Pustyn for this. Here he awaited the order of the Synod, but, feeling unwell, was taken away by his daughter and died at the Astapovo postal station.

Philosophy

The religious and moral imperatives of Tolstoy were the source of the Tolstoy movement, one of the fundamental theses of which is the thesis of "non-resistance to evil by force." 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 by force».

In particular, Ilyin I. A. spoke out against the position of non-resistance, which gave rise to disputes in the philosophical environment, in his work “On Resistance to Evil by Force” (1925)

Criticism of Tolstoy and Tolstoyism

• The chief procurator of the Holy Synod of Victorious in his private letter dated February 18, 1887 to Emperor Alexander III wrote about Tolstoy's drama The Power of Darkness: “I have just read a new drama by L. Tolstoy and cannot recover from horror. And they assure me that they are preparing to give it at the Imperial Theaters and are already learning the roles. I do not know anything like this in any literature. It is unlikely that Zola himself reached such a degree of rough realism, which Tolstoy becomes here. The day on which Tolstoy's drama will be presented at the Imperial Theaters will be the day decisive fall our scene, which has already fallen very low.

• The leader of the extreme left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin), after the revolutionary upheavals of 1905-1907, wrote, being in forced emigration, in his work “Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution” (1908): “Tolstoy ridiculous, like a prophet who discovered new recipes for the salvation of mankind - and therefore the foreign and Russian “Tolstoyans”, who wished to turn into dogma just the weakest side of his teaching, are completely miserable. Tolstoy is great as a spokesman for those ideas and those moods that had developed among millions of the Russian peasantry at the time of the onset of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. Tolstoy is original, because the totality of his views, taken as a whole, expresses precisely the peculiarities of our revolution, as a peasant bourgeois revolution. The contradictions in the views of Tolstoy, from this point of view, are a real mirror of those contradictory conditions in which the historical activity of the peasantry was placed in our revolution. ".
• The Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in early 1918: “L. Tolstoy must be recognized as the greatest Russian nihilist, destroyer of all values ​​and shrines, destroyer of culture. Tolstoy triumphed, his anarchism triumphed, his non-resistance, his denial of the state and culture, his moralistic demand for equality in poverty and non-existence and subordination to the peasant kingdom and physical labor. But this triumph of Tolstoyism turned out to be less meek and beautiful-hearted than Tolstoy imagined. It is unlikely that he himself would have rejoiced at such a triumph. The godless nihilism of Tolstoyism, its terrible poison that destroys the Russian soul, is exposed. To save Russia and Russian culture with a red-hot iron, Tolstoy's morality, low and exterminating, must be burned out of the Russian soul.

His own article “The Spirits of the Russian Revolution” (1918): “There is nothing prophetic in Tolstoy, he did not foresee or predict anything. As an artist, he is drawn to the crystallized past. He did not have that sensitivity to the dynamism of human nature, which was in the highest degree in Dostoevsky. But it is not Tolstoy's artistic insights that triumph in the Russian revolution, but his moral assessments. There are few Tolstoyans in the narrow sense of the word who share Tolstoy's doctrine, and they represent an insignificant phenomenon. But Tolstoyism in the broad, non-doctrinal sense of the word is very characteristic of a Russian person; it determines Russian moral assessments. Tolstoy was not a direct teacher of the Russian left intelligentsia; Tolstoy's religious teaching was alien to her. But Tolstoy captured and expressed the peculiarities of the moral make-up of most of the Russian intelligentsia, perhaps even a Russian intellectual, perhaps even a Russian person in general. And the Russian revolution is a kind of triumph of Tolstoyism. It imprinted both Russian Tolstoy moralism and Russian immorality. This Russian moralism and this Russian immorality are interconnected and are two sides of the same disease. moral consciousness. Tolstoy was able to instill in the Russian intelligentsia a hatred for everything historically individual and historically different. He was the spokesman for that side of Russian nature that abhorred historical power and historical glory. This he taught in an elementary and simplified way to moralize over history and transfer to historical life the moral categories of individual life. By this, he morally undermined the opportunity for the Russian people to live a historical life, to fulfill their historical destiny and historical mission. He morally prepared the historical suicide of the Russian people. He clipped the wings of the Russian people as a historical people, morally poisoned the sources of any impulse to historical creativity. World War lost by Russia because Tolstoy's moral assessment of the war prevailed in it. In the terrible hour of the world struggle, the Russian people were weakened, apart from betrayal and animal egoism, by Tolstoy's moral assessments. Tolstoy's morality disarmed Russia and handed her over to the enemy.

• V. Mayakovsky, D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, called for "to throw Tolstoy L. N. and others from the steamer of modernity" in the 1912 Futurist manifesto "Slap in the face of public taste"
• George Orwell defended W. Shakespeare against Tolstoy's criticism

• Researcher of the history of Russian theological thought and culture Georgy Florovsky (1937): “There is one decisive contradiction in Tolstoy's experience. He certainly had the temperament of a preacher or a moralist, but he had no religious experience at all. Tolstoy was not religious at all, he was religiously mediocre. Tolstoy did not derive his “Christian” worldview from the Gospel at all. He already compares the gospel with his own view, and therefore he cuts and adapts it so easily. The gospel for him is a book compiled many centuries ago by “poorly educated and superstitious people,” and it cannot be accepted in its entirety. But Tolstoy does not mean scientific criticism, but simply personal choice or selection. Tolstoy, in some strange way, seemed to be mentally late in the 18th century, and therefore found himself outside of history and modernity. And he deliberately leaves the present for some far-fetched past. All his work is, in this respect, some kind of continuous moralistic robinsonade. Annenkov also called Tolstoy's mind sectarian. There is a striking discrepancy between the aggressive maximalism of Tolstoy's socio-ethical denunciations and denials and the extreme poverty of his positive moral teaching. All morality comes down to him to common sense and worldly prudence. “Christ teaches us exactly how we can get rid of our misfortunes and live happily.” And that's what the Gospel is all about! Here Tolstoy's insensitivity becomes eerie, and "common sense" turns into madness... rejection of history, only a way out of culture and simplification, that is, through the removal of questions and the rejection of tasks. Moralism in Tolstoy turns around historical nihilism.»

• The holy righteous John of Kronstadt sharply criticized Tolstoy (see “Reply of Father John of Kronstadt to the appeal of Count L. N. Tolstoy to the clergy”), and in his dying diary (August 15 - October 2, 1908) he wrote:

"24 August. How long, O Gdy, do you tolerate the worst atheist who has confused the whole world, Leo Tolstoy? How long do you call him to Your Judgment? Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward with Me will repay anyone according to his deeds? (Rev. Apoc 22:12) Gd, the earth is tired of enduring his blasphemy. -»
"6 September. Where, do not allow Leo Tolstoy, a heretic who surpassed all heretics, to reach the Blessed Virgin Mary before the feast of the Nativity, whom he blasphemed terribly and blasphemes. Take him from the earth - this fetid corpse, stinking the whole earth with its pride. Amen. 9pm."

• In 2009, as part of a court case on the liquidation of the local religious organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses Taganrog, a forensic examination was carried out, in the conclusion of which Leo Tolstoy was quoted: “I am convinced that the teaching of the [Russian Orthodox] Church is theoretically insidious and harmful lie, but a collection of the grossest superstitions and witchcraft, which completely hides the whole meaning of Christian teaching, ”which was characterized as forming a negative attitude towards the Russian Orthodox Church, and Leo Tolstoy himself as“ an opponent of Russian Orthodoxy ”.

Expert evaluation of individual statements of Tolstoy

• In 2009, as part of a court case on the liquidation of the local religious organization Taganrog, Jehovah's Witnesses, a forensic examination of the organization's literature was carried out for signs of inciting religious hatred, undermining respect for and hostility to other religions. The experts concluded that the Awake! contains (without specifying the source) the statement of Leo Tolstoy: "I was convinced that the teaching of the [Russian Orthodox] Church is theoretically an insidious and harmful lie, but in practice a collection of the grossest superstitions and witchcraft, hiding the entire meaning of Christian teaching," which was characterized as a formative negative attitude and undermining respect for the Russian Orthodox Church, and Leo Tolstoy himself as an "opponent of Russian Orthodoxy."

• In March 2010, in the Kirov Court of Yekaterinburg, Leo Tolstoy was accused of "inciting religious hatred against the Orthodox Church." Pavel Suslonov, an expert on extremism, testified: "Leo Tolstoy's leaflets 'Foreword to the Soldiers' Memo' and 'Officers' Memo'" directed to soldiers, sergeant majors and officers contain direct calls to incite inter-religious hatred directed against the Orthodox Church.

Bibliography

Tolstoy's translators

World recognition. Memory

Museums

In the former estate "Yasnaya Polyana" there is a museum dedicated to his life and work.

The main literary exposition about his life and work is in State Museum L. N. Tolstoy, in the former house of the Lopukhins-Stanitskaya (Moscow, Prechistenka 11); its branches also: at Lev Tolstoy station (former Astapovo station), the memorial museum-estate of L. N. Tolstoy "Khamovniki" (Leo Tolstoy Street, 21), an exhibition hall on Pyatnitskaya.

Figures of science, culture, politicians about L. N. Tolstoy

Screen versions of his works

• "Sunday"(English) resurrection, 1909, UK). 12 minute silent film by novel of the same name(screened during the life of the writer).
• "The Power of Darkness"(1909, Russia). Silent movie.
• "Anna Karenina"(1910, Germany). Silent movie.
• "Anna Karenina"(1911, Russia). Silent movie. Dir. - Maurice Meter
• "Living Dead"(1911, Russia). Silent movie.
• "War and Peace"(1913, Russia). Silent movie.
• "Anna Karenina"(1914, Russia). Silent movie. Dir. - V. Gardin
• "Anna Karenina"(1915, USA). Silent movie.
• "The Power of Darkness"(1915, Russia). Silent movie.
• "War and Peace"(1915, Russia). Silent movie. Dir. - Y. Protazanov, V. Gardin
• "Natasha Rostova"(1915, Russia). Silent movie. Producer - A. Khanzhonkov. Cast - V. Polonsky, I. Mozzhukhin
• "Living Dead"(1916). Silent movie.
• "Anna Karenina"(1918, Hungary). Silent movie.
• "The Power of Darkness"(1918, Russia). Silent movie.
• "Living Dead"(1918). Silent movie.
• "Father Sergius"(1918, RSFSR). Silent motion picture film by Yakov Protazanov, in leading role Ivan Mozzhukhin
• "Anna Karenina"(1919, Germany). Silent movie.
• "Polikushka"(1919, USSR). Silent movie.
• "Love"(1927, USA. Based on the novel "Anna Karenina"). Silent movie. Anna as Greta Garbo
• "Living Dead"(1929, USSR). Cast - V. Pudovkin
• "Anna Karenina"(Anna Karenina, 1935, USA). Sound film. Anna as Greta Garbo
• « Anna Karenina"(Anna Karenina, 1948, UK). Anna as Vivien Leigh
• "War and Peace"(War & Peace, 1956, USA, Italy). In the role of Natasha Rostova - Audrey Hepburn
• "Agi Murad il diavolo bianco"(1959, Italy, Yugoslavia). As Hadji Murat - Steve Reeves
• "Too people"(1959, USSR, based on a fragment of "War and Peace"). Dir. G. Danelia, cast - V. Sanaev, L. Durov
• "Sunday"(1960, USSR). Dir. - M. Schweitzer
• "Anna Karenina"(Anna Karenina, 1961, USA). Vronsky as Sean Connery
• "Cossacks"(1961, USSR). Dir. - V. Pronin
• "Anna Karenina"(1967, USSR). In the role of Anna - Tatyana Samoilova
• "War and Peace"(1968, USSR). Dir. - S. Bondarchuk
• "Living Dead"(1968, USSR). In ch. roles - A. Batalov
• "War and Peace"(War & Peace, 1972, UK). TV series. Pierre - Anthony Hopkins
• "Father Sergius"(1978, USSR). Feature Film Igor Talankin, starring Sergey Bondarchuk
• « Caucasian story» (1978, USSR, based on the story "Cossacks"). In ch. roles - V. Konkin
• "Money"(1983, France-Switzerland, based on the story "False Coupon"). Dir. - Robert Bresson
• "Two Hussars"(1984, USSR). Dir. - Vyacheslav Krishtofovich
• "Anna Karenina"(Anna Karenina, 1985, USA). Anna as Jacqueline Bisset
• « simple death» (1985, USSR, based on the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"). Dir. - A. Kaidanovsky
• "Kreutzer Sonata"(1987, USSR). Cast - Oleg Yankovsky
• "For what?" (Za co?, 1996, Poland / Russia). Dir. - Jerzy Kavalerovich
• "Anna Karenina"(Anna Karenina, 1997, USA). In the role of Anna - Sophie Marceau, Vronsky - Sean Bean
• "Anna Karenina"(2007, Russia). In the role of Anna - Tatyana Drubich

For more details, see: List of film adaptations of Anna Karenina 1910-2007.

• "War and Peace"(2007, Germany, Russia, Poland, France, Italy). TV series. In the role of Andrei Bolkonsky - Alessio Boni.

Documentary

• "Lev Tolstoy". Documentary. TSSDF (RTSSDF). 1953. 47 minutes.

Movies about Leo Tolstoy

• "The Departure of the Great Old Man"(1912, Russia). Director - Yakov Protazanov
• "Lev Tolstoy"(1984, USSR, Czechoslovakia). Director - S. Gerasimov
• "Last Station"(2008). In the role of L. Tolstoy - Christopher Plummer, in the role of Sophia Tolstoy - Helen Mirren. Film about last days writer's life.

Gallery of portraits

Tolstoy's translators

• On the Japanese- Konishi Masutaro
• On the French- Michel Ocouturier, Vladimir Lvovich Binstock
• In Spanish - Selma Ancira
• In English - Constance Garnett, Leo Viner, Aylmer and Louise Maude
• Into Norwegian - Martin Grahn, Olaf Broch, Marta Grundt
• In Bulgarian - Sava Nichev, Georgi Shopov, Hristo Dosev
• In Kazakh - Ibray Altynsarin
• Into Malay - Viktor Pogadaev
• In Esperanto - Valentin Melnikov, Viktor Sapozhnikov
• In Azerbaijani - Dadash-zade, Mammad Arif Maharram ogly