Tolstoy, Leo

Lev Nikolaevich (Leo) Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy family estate a hundred miles south of Moscow on August 28. He died on November 20 at a nearby railroad station, having fled in the night from an increasingly contentious marriage and a set of familial relationships that had been hardened in large part by Tolstoy's attempts to apply his radical moral beliefs to his own life. In the intervening eighty-two years Tolstoy became perhaps the most prominent novelist in an age and place of great authors as well as a vociferous critic of science and modernization.

Tolstoy's international fame rests primarily on two novels, War and Peace (1865–1869) and Anna Karenina (1875–1877). His fictional works also include short masterpieces such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886), "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889), and "Master and Man" (1895). In addition he wrote autobiographical accounts of his childhood (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth [1852–1857]) and his experiences as a soldier in the Crimean War (Sevastopol Sketches [1855]). With regard to issues of science, technology, and ethics Tolstoy's most relevant writings include a variety of short, passionate non-fiction works, particularly "What I Believe" (1884), "What Then Must We Do?" (1887), "On the Significance of Science and Art" (1887), "What Is Art?" (1898), and "I Cannot Be Silent" (1908), all of which address a confluence of moral and intellectual errors he perceived in modern life and thought at the turn of the twentieth century.

Tolstoy directed his most trenchant criticisms at the insensitive intellectuality of the urban elites, which he considered distant from the natural values of the land and its laborers; the modern Western adherence to science and its methods; and thinkers such as Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Georg Hegel (1770–1831), and simplistic interpreters of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who built positivist historical and scientific doctrines on what he considered rickety evidence.

Despite his turn toward the simplicity of peasant agricultural values and the teachings of the Gospels, Tolstoy's commitment to a questioning, empirical worldview was deep. Tolstoy was never interested in a vague and disconnected mysticism. Those who consider themselves capable of circumscribing the infinite multiplicity of the world with their "scientific" theories were deluding themselves, he argued. People are not incapable of knowing or perceiving many of the causes or influences on which the natural and human world has been founded; it is simply that there are far too many influences, causes, and effects for people to remember and record, and to be able to integrate the available material in a scientifically conclusive manner. Positivistic science rests on a lack of respect for the multiplicity of the natural and human worlds. Assuming too much about human capabilities to know and understand is, in the world of social action and belief, morally dangerous.

Like his contemporary Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), whom he never met, Tolstoy was broadly concerned with the spiritual future of the human race. He attempted to confront the gradual movement away from traditional values with an almost Aristotelian emphasis on the permanent relationships of things, promoting the universality of natural and religious values of love and labor to which he believed the human heart responds. Although the West now knows him as the writer of large and perhaps infrequently read novels, his influence on writers and political dissidents such as Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) has been enormous, and his thought provides resources for ethical assessments of science and technology that have not yet been explored fully.

Russian Perspectives.

Bayley, John O. (1967). Tolstoy and the Novel. New York: Viking Penguin. Regarded by some as the finest, most incisive one-volume study of Tolstoy and his literary legacy.

Berlin, Isaiah. (1978). "The Hedgehog and the Fox" and "Tolstoy and the Enlightenment." In Russian Thinkers. New York: Penguin. Berlin's syntheses of historical and intellectual currents in nineteenth century Russia are accessible and brilliant. "The Hedgehog and the Fox" may be his most famous essay. Berlin's analyses of Tolstoy's influence on his own epoch, and the epoch's influence on Tolstoy, are unsurpassed.

Troyat, Henri. (2001). Tolstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux. New York: Grove/Atlantic. Troyat's biography of Tolstoy is a new translation from the French. The dominant Tolstoy biography in Europe, it is an aspiring work of literature in itself.

Wilson, A. N. (2001). Tolstoy: A Biography. New York: Norton. Written by a prolific English literary biographer and novelist; more analytic in tone than Troyat's biography.

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