1862 Lev Nikolayevich
graf Tolstoy, 34, marries teenager.
^top^
Count Leo Tolstoy married Sophie
Andreyevna Behrs. Tolstoy is nearly twice the age of his teenage
bride. After losing his parents as a child, Tolstoy inherited
a large estate and was raised by relatives. He began studies
at Kazan University at age 16 but was disappointed in the quality
of education and returned to his estate in 1847 without a degree.
He proceeded to live a wild and dissolute life in Moscow and
St. Petersburg for the next four years. In 1851, he joined the
army and fought in the Crimean war.
He wrote about his wartime experiences
in the successful Sebastapol Sketches, published in 1855.
He also wrote several other autobiographical works while in
the army. In 1857, Tolstoy visited Europe and became interested
in education. He started a school for peasant children on his
estate and studied progressive educational techniques.
The year after his marriage,
he published his first successful novel, The Cossacks.
Tolstoy and his wife proceeded to have 13 children over the
next 17 years. Tolstoy was constantly engaged in a spiritual
struggle between his responsibilities as a wealthy landlord
and his desire to renounce his property altogether.
Some of his inner turmoil appeared
in his great masterpieces War
and Peace (1865-1869) and Anna
Karenina (1875-1877). Later in his life, he tried to
give away the rights to his works, but his wife gained control
of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880. Tolstoy
became increasingly radical, embraced anarchism, and was excommunicated
from the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1910, he fled his home
secretly with his youngest daughter but caught pneumonia and
died at a remote railway station a few days later, on 20 November
1910.
Ne; le 9 septembre (Gregorien)
1828 dans une riche et noble famille russe, il se preoccupe
du sort des paysans pauvres. Apres avoir participe à la Guerre
de Crimee (1854 - 1856), il abandonne famille et richesse pour
vivre avec les paysans. Son roman le plus celebre est Guerre
et Paix.
War
and Peace (1865-69) contains three kinds of material — a
historical account of the Napoleonic wars, the biographies of
fictional characters, and a set of essays about the philosophy
of history.
The work's historical portions
narrate the campaign of 1805 leading to Napoleon's victory at
the Battle of Austerlitz, a period of peace, and Napoleon's
invasion of Russia in 1812. Tolstoy portrays Napoleon as an
ineffective, egomaniacal buffoon, Tsar Alexander I as a phrasemaker
obsessed with how historians will describe him, and the Russian
general Mikhail Kutuzov as a patient old man who understands
the limitations of human will and planning. Particularly noteworthy
are the novel's battle scenes, which show combat as sheer chaos.
Among the book's fictional characters,
the reader's attention is first focused on Prince Andrey Bolkonsky,
a proud man who has come to despise everything fake, shallow,
or merely conventional. He joins the army to achieve glory.
Badly wounded at Austerlitz, he comes to see glory and Napoleon
as no less petty than the salons of St. Petersburg. Prince Andrey
repeatedly discovers the emptiness of the activities to which
he has devoted himself. Tolstoy's description of his death in
1812 is usually regarded as one of the most effective scenes
in Russian literature.
The novel's other hero, the bumbling
and sincere Pierre Bezukhov, oscillates between belief in some
philosophical system promising to resolve all questions and
a relativism so total as to leave him in apathetic despair.
He at last discovers the Tolstoyan truth that wisdom is to be
found not in systems but in the ordinary processes of daily
life, especially in his marriage to the novel's most memorable
heroine, Natasha. When the book stops Pierre seems to be forgetting
this lesson in his enthusiasm for a new utopian plan.
The book's truly wise characters
are not its intellectuals but a simple, decent soldier, Natasha's
brother Nikolay, and a generous pious woman, Andrey's sister
Marya. Their marriage symbolizes the novel's central prosaic
values.
The essays in War and Peace,
which begin in the second half of the book, satirize all attempts
to formulate general laws of history and reject the ill-considered
assumptions supporting all historical narratives. In Tolstoy's
view, history, like battle, is essentially the product of contingency,
has no direction, and fits no pattern. The causes of historical
events are infinitely varied and forever unknowable, and so
historical writing, which claims to explain the past, necessarily
falsifies it. According to Tolstoy's essays, history is made
by the sum total of an infinite number of small decisions taken
by ordinary people, whose actions are too unremarkable to be
documented. Therefore Tolstoy's novel gives its readers countless
examples of small incidents that each exert a tiny influence — which
is one reason that War and Peace is so long.
In Anna
Karenina (1875-77) Tolstoy applied these ideas to
family life. The novel's first sentence, which indicates its
concern with the domestic, is perhaps Tolstoy's most famous:
"All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family
is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina interweaves the stories
of three families, the Oblonskys, the Karenins, and the Levins.
The novel begins at the Oblonskys, where the long-suffering
wife Dolly has discovered the infidelity of her genial and sybaritic
husband Stiva. In her kindness, care for her family, and concern
for everyday life, Dolly stands as the novel's moral compass.
By contrast, Stiva, though never wishing ill, wastes resources,
neglects his family, and regards pleasure as the purpose of
life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that
evil, no less than good, ultimately derives from the small moral
choices human beings make moment by moment. Stiva's sister Anna
begins the novel as the faithful wife of the stiff, unromantic,
but otherwise decent government minister Aleksey Karenin and
the mother of a young boy, Seryozha. But Anna, who imagines
herself the heroine of a romantic novel, allows herself to fall
in love with an officer, Aleksey Vronsky. Schooling herself
to see only the worst in her husband, she eventually leaves
him and her son to live with Vronsky. Throughout the novel,
Tolstoy indicates that the romantic idea of love, which most
people identify with love itself, is entirely incompatible with
the superior kind of love, the intimate love of good families.
As the novel progresses, Anna, who suffers pangs of conscience
for abandoning her husband and child, develops a habit of lying
to herself until she reaches a state of near madness and total
separation from reality. She at last commits suicide by throwing
herself under a train. The realization that she may have been
thinking about life incorrectly comes to her only when she is
lying on the track, and it is too late to save herself. The
third story concerns Dolly's sister Kitty, who first imagines
she loves Vronsky but then recognizes that real love is the
intimate feeling she has for her family's old friend, Konstantin
Levin. Their story focuses on courtship, marriage, and the ordinary
incidents of family life, which, in spite of many difficulties,
shape real happiness and a meaningful existence. Throughout
the novel, Levin is tormented by philosophical questions about
the meaning of life in the face of death. Although these questions
are never answered, they vanish when Levin begins to live correctly
by devoting himself to his family and to daily work. Like his
creator Tolstoy, Levin regards the systems of intellectuals
as spurious and as incapable of embracing life's complexity.
Upon completing Anna Karenina,
Tolstoy fell into a profound state of existential despair, which
he describes in his Ispoved (1884; A Confession).
The Kreutzer Sonata (1891) is a dark novella about
a man who murders his wife.
Smert Ivana Ilicha (written
1886; The
Death of Ivan Ilych) is a novella describing a
man's gradual realization that he is dying and that his life
has been wasted on trivialities.
Otets Sergy (written 1898;
Father
Sergius), which may be taken as Tolstoy's self-critique,
tells the story of a proud man who wants to become a saint but
discovers that sainthood cannot be consciously sought. Regarded
as a great holy man, Sergius comes to realize that his reputation
is groundless; warned by a dream, he escapes incognito to seek
out a simple and decent woman whom he had known as a child.
At last he learns that not he but she is the saint, that sainthood
cannot be achieved by imitating a model, and that true saints
are ordinary people unaware of their own prosaic goodness. This
story therefore seems to criticize the ideas Tolstoy espoused
after his conversion from the perspective of his earlier great
novels.
In 1899 Tolstoy published his
third long novel, Voskreseniye (Resurrection).
The novel's hero, the idle aristocrat Dmitry Nekhlyudov, finds
himself on a jury where he recognizes the defendant, the prostitute
Katyusha Maslova, as a woman whom he once had seduced, thus
precipitating her life of crime. After she is condemned to imprisonment
in Siberia, he decides to follow her and, if she will agree,
to marry her. In the novel's most remarkable exchange, she reproaches
him for his hypocrisy: once you got your pleasure from me, and
now you want to get your salvation from me, she tells him. She
refuses to marry him, but, as the novel ends, Nekhlyudov achieves
spiritual awakening when he at last understands Tolstoyan truths,
especially the futility of judging others. The novel's most
celebrated sections satirize the church and the justice system,
but the work is generally regarded as markedly inferior to War
and Peace and Anna Karenina.
The novella Hadji
Murad (1904) is a brilliant narrative about the Caucasus.
Lev
Nicolayevich Tolstoy: Anna
Karenina. Roman v vos'my chastyakh
(po-russki)
TOLSTOY ONLINE (in English translations): |
On
a 23 September: 
Two subsidiaries of El Paso had a contract to ship up to 1.2 billion
cubic feet of gas a day — nearly 20% of the state's supply —
to Southern California. Gas prices in the region plummeted after the
El Paso contract expired at the end of May 2001. Wagner initially decided
there was not sufficient evidence to show that El Paso withheld pipeline
capacity. But FERC asked him to take a second look based on recommendations
from the commission's staff investigators. He earlier ruled that the
subsidiaries violated federal rules governing the award of gas contracts.
1954 East German police arrest 400 citizens as US spies.
