"What Is Art?" (excerpts) by Leo Tolstoy

This essay (originally published in 1896) and the translation by Alymer Maude (first published in 1899) are in the public domain and may be freely reproduced.

About the Author: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), although best known for his literary works, also wrote various essays on art, history, and religion.

The discussion questions, bibliographic references, and hyperlinks have been added by Julie Van Camp. (Copyright Julie C. Van Camp 1997) They too may be freely reproduced, so long as this complete citation is included with any such reproductions.

Paragraph numbering below has been added to facilitate class discussion. It was not included in the original text.



CHAPTER FIVE (excerpts). . .

#1. In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man.

#2. Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.

#3. Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means of intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.

#4. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena.

#5. And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man's expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.

#6. If a man infects another or others directly, immediately, by his appearance or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering - that does not amount to art.

#7. Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer.

#8. The feelings with which the artist infects others may be most various - very strong or very weak, very important or very insignificant, very bad or very good: feelings of love for one's own country, self-devotion and submission to fate or to God expressed in a drama, raptures of lovers described in a novel, feelings of voluptuousness expressed in a picture, courage expressed in a triumphal march, merriment evoked by a dance, humor evoked by a funny story, the feeling of quietness transmitted by an evening landscape or by a lullaby, or the feeling of admiration evoked by a beautiful arabesque - it is all art.

#9. If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

#10. To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

#11. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

#12. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

#13. As, thanks to man's capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others.

#14. If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kaspar Houser.

#15. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people might be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.

#16. And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.

#17. We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.

#18. This special importance has always been given by all men to that part of this activity which transmits feelings flowing from their religious perception, and this small part of art they have specifically called art, attaching to it the full meaning of the word.

#19. That was how man of old -- Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle - looked on art. Thus did the Hebrew prophets and the ancient Christians regard art; thus it was, and still is, understood by the Mohammedans, and thus it still is understood by religious folk among our own peasantry.

#20. Some teachers of mankind - as Plato in his Republic and people such as the primitive Christians, the strict Mohammedans, and the Buddhists -- have gone so far as to repudiate all art.

#21. People viewing art in this way (in contradiction to the prevalent view of today which regards any art as good if only it affords pleasure) considered, and consider, that art (as contrasted with speech, which need not be listened to) is so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art.

#22. Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. But not less wrong are the people of civilized European society of our class and day in favoring any art if it but serves beauty, i.e., gives people pleasure.

#23. Formerly people feared lest among the works of art there might chance to be some causing corruption, and they prohibited art altogether. Now they only fear lest they should be deprived of any enjoyment art can afford, and patronize any art. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

#24. Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about the art of our society, it is, therefore, first of all necessary to distinguish art from counterfeit art.

#25. There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art. And however poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who are also infected by it).

#26. It is true that this indication is an internal one, and that there are people who have forgotten what the action of real art is, who expect something else form art (in our society the great majority are in this state), and that therefore such people may mistake for this aesthetic feeling the feeling of diversion and a certain excitement which they receive from counterfeits of art. But though it is impossible to undeceive these people, just as it is impossible to convince a man suffering from "Daltonism" [a type of color blindness] that green is not red, yet, for all that, this indication remains perfectly definite to those whose feeling for art is neither perverted nor atrophied, and it clearly distinguishes the feeling produced by art from all other feelings.

#27. The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else's - as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist - not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

#28. If a man is infected by the author's condition of soul, if he feels this emotion and this union with others, then the object which has effected this is art; but if there be no such infection, if there be not this union with the author and with others who are moved by the same work - then it is not art. And not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.

#29. The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art, speaking now apart from its subject matter, i.e., not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.

#30. And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends on three conditions:

1. On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted;
2. on the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted;
3. on the sincerity of the artist, i.e., on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emotion he transmits.

#31. The more individual the feeling transmitted the more strongly does it act on the receiver; the more individual the state of soul into which he is transferred, the more pleasure does the receiver obtain, and therefore the more readily and strongly does he join in it.

#32. The clearness of expression assists infection because the receiver, who mingles in consciousness with the author, is the better satisfied the more clearly the feeling is transmitted, which, as it seems to him, he has long known and felt, and for which he has only now found expression.

#33. But most of all is the degree of infectiousness of art increased by the degree of sincerity in the artist. As soon as the spectator, hearer, or reader feels that the artist is infected by his own production, and writes, sings, or plays for himself, and not merely to act on others, this mental condition of the artist infects the receiver; and contrariwise, as soon as the spectator, reader, or hearer feels that the author is not writing, singing, or playing for his own satisfaction - does not himself feel what he wishes to express - but is doing it for him, the receiver, a resistance immediately springs up, and the most individual and the newest feelings and the cleverest technique not only fail to produce any infection but actually repel.

#34. I have mentioned three conditions of contagiousness in art, but they may be all summed up into one, the last, sincerity, i.e., that the artist should be impelled by an inner need to express his feeling. That condition includes the first; for if the artist is sincere he will express the feeling as he experienced it. And as each man is different from everyone else, his feeling will be individual for everyone else; and the more individual it is - the more the artist has drawn it from the depths of his nature - the more sympathetic and sincere will it be. And this same sincerity will impel the artist to find a clear expression of the feeling which he wishes to transmit.

#35. Therefore this third condition - sincerity - is the most important of the three. It is always complied with in peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so powerfully; but it is a condition almost entirely absent from our upper-class art, which is continually produced by artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness or vanity.

#36. Such are the three conditions which divide art from its counterfeits, and which also decide the quality of every work of art apart from its subject matter.

#37. The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a work form the category of art and relegates it to that of art's counterfeits. If the work does not transmit the artist's peculiarity of feeling and is therefore not individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it has not proceeded from the author's inner need for expression - it is not a work of art. If all these conditions are present, even in the smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of art.

#38. The presence in various degrees of these three conditions - individuality, clearness, and sincerity - decides the merit of a work of art as art, apart from subject matter. All works of art take rank of merit according to the degree in which they fulfill the first, the second, and the third of these conditions. In one the individuality of the feeling transmitted may predominate; in another, clearness of expression; in a third, sincerity; while a fourth may have sincerity and individuality but be deficient in clearness; a fifth, individuality and clearness but less sincerity; and so forth, in all possible degrees and combinations.

#39. Thus is art divided from that which is not art, and thus is the quality of art as art decided, independently of its subject matter, i.e., apart from whether the feelings it transmits are good or bad.

#40. But how are we to define good and bad art with reference to its subject matter?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Tolstoy characterizes art in terms of the relationship of the observer/perceiver both to the artist and to others who perceive the work. What is the nature of that relationship?
2. He believes that art is an important condition of human life, as it is used to communicate human feelings or emotions. What are examples of this communication? Precisely how does this communication work, according to Tolstoy? What is needed for successful communication of emotions through art?
3. We communicate our feelings and emotions in ways other than art. What are examples of some of those other ways? What is unusual about the communication through art?
4. This artistic communication uses "external signs," according to Tolstoy (#11). What might be examples of these "signs." How are the "signs" used by artists different from, say, traffic signs or directional arrows in a public building? How is this "communication" with "external signs" different from "expression" with "external signs"? (#12)
5. Art is not about the production of "pleasure," Tolstoy claims. Use the "find" command on your browser (or word-processing program) to search for the passages where he refers to "pleasure." What does he seem to mean by "pleasure"? Is he consistent in these passages in his usage of "pleasure"? What does he seem so hostile to this as a way of understanding art?
6. Tolstoy lists several other proposals for understanding art that he rejects. (#12) Does his proposal seem more compelling than those he rejects? Why?
7. Tolstoy seems to accept a hierarchy in which there is "art" of everyday life and higher art imbued with religious perception (#17-18). Is this a plausible distinction? Is it consistent with distinctions you make? Does it explain the cultural importance of art?
8. Tolstoy discusses Plato's views on art (#19-23). What elements of Plato's view does he consider he? Does he agree with Plato on any of his views on art? With what does he disagree?
9. How does Tolstoy propose that we distinguish "real art" from "counterfeit art" (#24-28)? Is this a workable test? What problems do you see with it? Can you think of counter-examples that would challenge his view of how to make this distinction?
10. Tolstoy uses the test of infectiousness, not only as a descriptive measure for what should count as art, but also as a standard for good art (#28-32). What does he mean by this standard? How does he suggest we apply this test to evaluate art? Is this a useful proposal for evaluating the quality of art? If you disagree with this proposal, how would you challenge it?
11. How does "sincerity" function in Tolstoy's theory? Use the "find" command to consider all the passages where he refers to "sincerity." Is this a useful proposal for understanding and appreciating art? Can we ever be deceived about an artist's sincerity? How would Tolstoy respond to such a concern about deception?
12. Tolstoy values what he calls "peasant art" because of its sincerity (#35). Compare Tolstoy's discussion of "peasant art" with the praise by Clive Bell less than twenty years later of "primitive art" (Art, #16). Is their reasoning similar in any ways? How is it different? Do you think their praise of such art was coincidental?

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Anna Karenina

Review by Esther Lombardi

"Anna Karenina" is one of Leo Tolstoy's greatest literary works. It's the tale of Anna Karenina and her ultimately tragic love affair with Count Vronsky. This audio production offers Neville Jason's abridged version of Tolstoy's masterpiece.

What's in the Story

The story for "Anna Karenina" apparently came out of an episode in which Leo Tolstoy arrived at a railway station shortly after a young woman had committed suicide. She had been the mistress of a neighboring landowner, and the incident stuck in his mind...

As Tolstoy biographer Henri Troyat writes, "A dreadful lesson was brought home to him... He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death." Then, Troyat says, "Her image haunted him for a long time, but not specifically as material for a book."

When Tolstoy finally started the story of "Anna Karenina," his wife reported in a letter to her sister, "Yesterday Leo suddenly started to write a novel on contemporary life. The subject is the unfaithful wife and all the ensuing tragedy."

So, Tolstoy creates the character of Anna Karenina, a young woman who finds herself in a loveless marriage with Karenin. It might not have seemed so intolerable if she had not met and fallen in love with Count Vronsky.

As a comparison to Anna's tragic affair, we hear about the relationship between Kitty and Levin, a conjugal love match. Levin is first rejected by Kitty, since she has her heart set on Count Vronsky. Since Vronsky's affections are already taken by Anna Karenina, Kitty's heart is broken and she eventually turns back to Levin for love and marriage.

In the character of Anna, Tolstoy creates a woman who is perhaps most unhappily destined for tragedy. Anna falls in love with Count Vronsky, only to find that her passions are uncontrollable. She might have continued the relationship in secret, but she defies the "rules," and is forced to pay the ultimate price... She loses all contact with her son; and she is shunned from proper society.

In the "Notes," Neville Jason writes, "Thus the forces of society gradually bear down upon Anna with the same insensibility and inexorable momentum as the iron monster, which finally crushes the life out of her body on the railway line."

The Audio Connection

Along with the audio presentation of "Anna Karenina," Naxos Audiobooks interweaves the music of Rubinstein, Balakirev, Vitols, Ivanovici, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninov. It seems appropriate that the work of one of the greatest Russian writers should be accompanied by well-known Russian music.

Source: http://classiclit.about.com

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TOLSTOY'S LEGACY FOR MANKIND: A Manifesto for Nonviolence

It was in 1884 that Count Leo Tolstoy continued his personal confession in “My Religion” - he found in the principle of nonviolent resistance (which he called “non-resistance”) the key to understand the Gospels, a new understanding of his life and of modern society in his age. Nonviolence became the ethical basis for his doctrine of Truth Force which has later been developed by Mahatma Gandhi in his “Satyagraha” philosophy and Dr. Martin Luther King jr. in his concept of Soul-Force.
Leo Tolstoy, 1851.

1. My Religion

“My personal life is interwoven with the social, political life, and the political life demands of me a non-Christian activity, which is directly opposed to Christ's commandment. Now, with the universal military service and the participation of all in the court in the capacity of jurymen, this dilemma is with striking distinctness placed before all people. Every man has to take up the weapon of murder, the gun, the knife, and, though he does not kill, he must load his gun and whet his knife, that is, be prepared to commit murder. Every citizen must come to court and be a participant in the court and in the punishments, that is, every man has to renounce Christ's commandment of non-resistance to evil, not only in words, but in action as well.”(1)

And by the examples of the superior court and district court, criminal court and the court of arbitration Tolstoy illustrated the Christian doctrine condemning the State's principle of violent retaliation:

“Christ says, Do not resist evil. The purpose of the courts is to resist evil. Christ prescribes doing good in return for evil. The courts retaliate evil with evil. Christ says, Make no distinction between the good and the bad. All the courts do is to make this distinction. Christ says, Forgive all men; forgive, not once, not seven times, but without end; love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. The courts do not forgive, but punish; they do not do good, but evil, to those whom they call enemies of society. Thus it turns out, according to the meaning, that Christ must have rejected the courts.”(2)

Whereafter Tolstoy pointed out how often Jesus had come into conflict with the political law, because he returned back to the origin of Divine Law. Jesus broke the law of the privileged castes which tortured and finally killed him. The lasting impression of a public execution in France during his trip through Europe was reflected in Tolstoy's words of ethical disgust with the human criminal law in “My Religion”:

“No man with a heart has escaped that impression of terror and of doubt in the good, even at the recital, not to speak of the sight, of the executions of men by just such men, by means of rods, the guillotine, the gallows”.(3)

“Christ says, You have been impressed with the idea, and you have become accustomed to it, that it is good and rational by force to repel the evil and to pluck an eye out for an eye, to establish criminal courts, the police, the army, to resist the enemy: but I say, Use no violence, do not take part in violence, do no evil to any one, even to those whom you call your enemies”.(4)

Tolstoy realized that he would face stern resistance from two groups of people belonging to quite different ideological camps:

“These men belong to the two extreme poles: they are the patriotic and conservative Christians, who acknowledge that their church is the true one, and the atheistic Revolutionists. Neither the one nor the other will renounce the right of forcibly resisting what they regard as an evil. Not even the wisest and most learned among them want to see the simple, obvious truth that, if we concede to one man the right forcibly to resist what he considers an evil, a second person may with the same right resist what he regards as an evil”.(5)

Not the annihilation of evil but the increase of injustice has been the result of the law of violence in the social, political and economical field of human life:

“Not only Christ, but all Jewish prophets, John the Baptist, all the true sages of the world, speak of precisely this church, this state, this culture, this civilization, calling them evil and destruction of men”.(6)

Tolstoy condemned the law of violence. He revealed the law of love, benevolence and conscience. And he appealed to the morality of his readers, to realize the ethical commandments: no more and no longer tortures or executions of more and more victims :

“Who will deny that it is repulsive and painful to human nature, not only to torture or kill a man, but even to torture a dog, or to kill a chicken or a calf? (I know men living by agricultural labour, who have stopped eating meat only because they had themselves to kill their animals.)”(7)

“Not one judge would have the courage to strangle the man whom he has sentenced according to his law. Not one chief would have the courage to take a peasant away from a weeping family and lock him up in prison. Not one general or soldier would, without discipline, oath, or war, kill a hundred Turks or Germans, and lay waste their villages; he would not even have the courage to wound a single man. All this is done only thanks to that complicated political and social machine, whose problem it is so to scatter the responsibility of the atrocities which are perpetrated so that no man may feel the unnaturalness of these acts. Some write laws; others apply them; others again muster men, educating in them the habit of discipline, that is, of senseless and irresponsible obedience; others again -- these same mustered men -- commit every kind of violence, even killing men, without knowing why and for what purpose”.(8)

Leo Tolstoy, 1854

No analysis could be given more precisely of the fatal system of command-and-obey which characterises the military system. Tolstoy objected to the despotisms of the Russian Tzar and the German Kaiser as harshly as to the dilution of the same principle of power by British parliamentarism. In his writings of confession he testified against the pseudo-security of a complacent bourgeoisie and feudal caste:

“ whether to know that my peace and security and that of my family, all my joys and pleasures, are bought by the poverty, debauch, and suffering of millions, -- by annual gallows, hundreds of thousands of suffering prisoners and millions of soldiers, policemen, and guards, torn away from their families and dulled by discipline, who with loaded pistols, to be aimed at hungry men, secure the amusements for me; whether to buy every dainty piece which I put into my mouth, or into the mouths of my children, at the cost of all that suffering of humanity, which is inevitable for the acquisition of these pieces; or to know that any piece is only then my piece when nobody needs it, and nobody suffers for it”.(9)

Tolstoy was right to condemn the reproaches of Christ's doctrine being a chimera by reflecting upon the reality of the real social and political disorder:

“Christ's teaching about non-resistance to evil is a dream! And this, that the life of men, into whose souls pity and love for one another is put, has passed, for some, in providing stakes, knouts, racks, cat-o'-nine-tails, tearing of nostrils, inquisitions, fetters, hard labour, gallows, executions by shooting, solitary confinements, prisons for women and children, in providing slaughter of tens of thousands in war, in providing revolutions and seditions; and for others, in executing all these horrors; and for others again, in avoiding all these sufferings and retaliating for them, - such a life is not a dream!”.(10)

Tolstoy illustrated the lucidity of the Christian doctrine of Non-Resistance, the key to understand the Gospels, with the ancient prophet Elijah to whom God manifested himself not with thunder and lightning but in a smooth breeze blowing from the refreshed leas after the storm:

“The movement of humanity toward the good takes place, not thanks to the tormentors, but to the tormented. As fire does not put out fire, so evil does not put out evil. Only the good meeting the evil, and not becoming contaminated by it, vanquishes the evil. Every step in advance has been made only in the name of non-resistance to evil. And if this progress is slow, it is so because the clearness, simplicity, rationality, inevitableness, and obligatoriness of Christ's teaching have been concealed from the majority of men in a most cunning and dangerous manner; they have been concealed under a false teaching which falsely calls itself his teaching”.(11)

Tolstoy learned Hebrew and Greek in order to read and translate the Holy Scripts of Judaism and Christianity in their ancient translations. Before he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, he had written “A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology” and “The Gospel in Brief”, and, in addition, Tolstoy later gave an account of Christian doctrines in a version dedicated to children, which actually explained the originary meaning of Christ's teachings to all people who could read and listen.

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Leo Tolstoy, 1909
2. The Kingdom of God is Within You

In his famous work “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), Leo Tolstoy laid down his political philosophy of nonviolent resistance. He ostracized in particular the modern slavery of military conscription or compulsory military service which had been introduced in Russia after the army reform of 1874:

“The establishment of general military service is like the activity of a man who wants to prop up a rotten house. The walls are crumbling - he puts rafters to them; the roof slopes inwards, he build up a framework; boards give way between the rafters, he supports them with other beams. At last it turns out that although the scaffolding keeps the house together, it renders it quite uninhibitable”.

It is the same with universal military service, which destroys all the advantages of that social life which it is supposed to guarantee.

The benefits of social life consist in the security given to property and labour, and in the mutual co-operation towards general welfare. Military service destroys all this.

“The taxes levied on the people for armaments and war absorb the greater part of the products of that labour which the army is called upon to protect. Taking away the whole male population from the ordinary occupations of their life destroys the very possibility of labour. The menace of war, ever ready to break out from one moment to the next, renders vain and profitless all improvements of social life”.(12)

“For Governments, general military service is the utmost limit of violence required for the support of the whole system; for subjects, it is the utmost limit of possible subjection. It is the key-stone in the arch which supports the walls, whose removal would demolish the whole building”.

“The time has come when the ever-increasing abuses of Governments and their mutual feuds require from their subjects such material and moral sacrifices, that every man must necessarily hesitate and ask himself: Can I make these sacrifices? And for what am I to make them? they are required in the name of the State. In the name of the State I am required to give up everything that is dear to man: family, safety, a peaceful life and personal self-respect”.(13)

It was quite significant that in the nineteenth century North American preachers gave up their offices within their denominations to found Socialist communities influenced by the ideas of the French Utopian thinker Charles Fourier in order to restore the pioneering spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers in post-revolutionary USA against the expansionist economism of early capitalism. Among those who wanted to revive the revolutionary spirit of the independence struggle against the British colonial power, we find the first secular theorists of Non-Resistance with arguments even for non-believers, atheists or agnostics. In his book “The Kingdom of God is Within You” Tolstoy quoted the voices of Adin Ballou and the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who opposed the system of slavery. “The Kingdom of God is Within You” captured young Gandhi's interest as an Indian lawyer in South Africa and won him over to follow Tolstoy's influence.

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3. William Lloyd Garrison

The participants of the Peace Convention in Boston 1838 drafted a Declaration of Sentiments in order to abolish war. These American precursors of Tolstoy's teachings of Non-Resistance were quoted by Leo Tolstoy:

“We register our testimony, not only against all wars, whether offensive or defensive, but all preparations for war; against every naval ship, every arsenal, every fortification; against the militia system and a standing army; against all military chieftains and soldiers; against all monuments commemorative of victory over a foreign foe, all trophies won in battle, all celebrations in honor of military or naval exploits; against all appropriations for the defence of a nation by force and arms on the part of any legislative body; against every edict of government, requiring of its subjects military service. Hence we deem it unlawful to bear arms, or to hold a military office”.

“As every human government is upheld by physical strength, and its laws are enforced virtually at the point of the bayonet, we cannot hold any office which imposes upon its incumbent the obligation to compel men to do right, on pain of imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity”.(14)

These words indicate the principal refusal to cooperate with a system of injustice. The Roman law 'ius talionis', the law of retaliatory violence, had been laid down in the Law of Twelve Tables. The Non-Resisters criticised revenge as an endemical principle of contagious violence. The Non-Resisters were inspired by the ancient prophetic tradition and by their Christian political concept of nonviolent redemption.

“If we abide by our principles, it is impossible for us to be disorderly, or plot treason, or participate in any evil work; we shall submit to every ordinance of man, for the Lord's sake; obey all the requirements of government, except such as we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel; and in no case resist the operation of law, except by meekly submitting to the penalty of disobedience.

But while we shall adhere to the doctrine of non-resistance and passive submission, we purpose, in a moral and spiritual sense, to speak and act boldly in the cause of God; to assail iniquity in high places and in low places; to apply our principles to all existing civil, political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions; and to hasten the time when the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever”.(15)

The individual boycott of war and poll taxes, of which Henry David Thoreau had given an example before writing his inspiring essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” against the Government, the massive individual conscientious objection against all military services, against war preparation or participation in war, according to Leo Tolstoy's recommendation, the historical example of Indian “Satyagraha in South Africa” guided by Mahatma Gandhi, and the boycotts of the Civil Rights Movement claiming equal rights for all citizens guided by Dr. Martin Luther King jr. - all these realised the principle of non-cooperation with any political system which is based on injustice.

“It appears to us a self-evident truth, that, whatever the gospel is designed to destroy at any period of the world, being contrary to it, ought now to be abandoned. If, then, the time is predicted when swords shall be beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning-hooks, and men shall not learn the art of war any more, it follows that all who manufacture, sell, or wield those deadly weapons do thus array themselves against the peaceful dominion of the Son of God on earth.

Hence, we shall employ lecturers, circulate tracts and publications, form societies, and petition our state and national governments, in relation to the subject of Universal Peace. It will be our leading object to devise ways and means for effecting a radical change in the views, feelings, and practices of society, respecting the sinfulness of war and the treatment of enemies.

In entering upon the great work before us, we are not unmindful that, in its prosecution, we may be called to test our sincerity even as in a fiery ordeal. It may subject us to insult, outrage, suffering, yea, even death itself. We anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, calumny. Tumults may rise against us. The ungodly and violent, the proud and pharisaical, the ambitious and tyrannical, principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places, may contrive to crush us. So they treated the Messiah, whose example we are humbly striving to imitate. If we suffer with Him we know that we shall reign with Him. We shall not be afraid of their terror, neither be troubled”.(16)

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4. Adin Ballou

Leo Tolstoy corresponded with Adin Ballou, author of a dialogue on the teaching of Non-Resistance, and he discussed with him the ethical problem of self-defence which Tolstoy rejected by principle. In a pamphlet entitled “How many people are necessary to transform evil into justice”, Adin Ballou rejected pseudo-legitimations for murder politically sanctioned. In his “Catechism of Non-Resistance”, Adin Ballou consistently rejected human ways of behaviour such as insults, killing and hurting because of self-defense, the judicial procedures of claiming in order to punish people for an insult, the participation in armies against interior or exterior enemies, the participation in wars or armaments for war, the participation in drafting or equipping soldiers, voting at the poll elections, the participation in the courts or in the administration as participation in the power of governments, the paying of taxes for a government “that is kept up by war power, by capital punishment, generally by violence”, which means that one should not resist taxation by means of violence. Adin Ballou's comprehensive rejection of any kind of violence also referred to the political monopoly of violence and calls it evil that can only be destroyed by the doctrine of Non-Resistance. Ballou wrote about the principle of voluntary suffering to overcome the régime of violence:

“Good deeds cannot be performed under all circumstances without self-sacrifice, privations, suffering, and, in extreme cases, without the loss of life itself. But he who prizes life more than the fulfilment of God's will is already dead to the only true life. Such a man, in trying to save his life, will lose it. Furthermore, wherever non-resistance costs the sacrifice of one's life, or of some essential advantage of life, resistance costs thousands of such sacrifices.

Non-resistance preserves; resistance destroys.

It is much safer to act justly than injustly; to endure an offense rather than resist it by violence; safer even in regard to the present life. If all men refused to resist evil, the world would be a happy one.

Even if but one man were to act thus, and the others should agree to crucify him, would it not be more glorious for him to die in the glory of non-resisting love, praying for his enemies, than live wearing the crown of Caesar, besprinkled with the blood of the murdered? But whether it be one man or thousands of men who are firmly determined not to resist evil by evil, still, whether in the midst of civilized or uncivilized neighbors, men who do not rely on violence are safer than those who do. A robber, a murderer, a villain, will be less likely to harm them if he finds them offering no armed resistance. “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” and he who seeks peace, who acts like a friend, who is inoffensive, who forgives and forgets injuries, generally enjoys peace, or if he dies, he dies a blessed death”.(17)

And Adin Ballou resumed in his “Catechism of Non-Resistance”:

“Hence, if all were to follow the commandment of non-resistance, there would manifestly be neither offense nor evil-doing. If even the majority were composed of such men they would establish the rule of love and good-will even toward the offenders, by not resisting evil by evil nor using violence. Even if such men formed a numerous minority, they would have such an improving moral influence over society that every severe punishment would be revoked, and violence and enmity would be replaced by peace and good-will. If they formed but a small minority, they would rarely experience anything worse than the contempt of the world, while the world, without preserving it or feeling grateful therefor, would become better and wiser from its latent influence. And if, in the most extreme cases, certain members of the minority might be persecuted unto death, these men, thus dying for the truth, would have left their doctrine already sanctified by the blood of martyrdom.

Peace be with all ye who seek peace; and may the all-conquering love be the imperishable inheritance of every soul who submits of its own accord to the law of Christ.

Resist not evil by violence”.(18)

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5. Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig

As a young student, Romain Rolland (1866-1944) surprisingly received a long letter written in French language by Leo Tolstoy. This was in 1887. Romain Rolland wrote altogether seven letters to Tolstoy between 1887 and 1906. Most of these letters were reflections about the role of art and the artist in society. Tolstoy replied only once, to the first letter of Rolland. Rolland was inspired by Tolstoy's political writings. Tolstoy's writings about the Doukhobors inspired Rolland to write his drama “Le Temps viendra” (The Time will come) against the Boer War in 1903. In 1911, Rolland published “Vie de Tolstoi” (The Life of Tolstoy). In 1924, Rolland published his famous Gandhi biography. Rolland wanted to create an International of Intellectuals to stop the war machinery.

Romain Rolland was one of the very few European intellectuals who spoke out against the First World War right from the beginning. Actually he followed Tolstoy's example thinking responsible for his generation when he took a Pacifist stand against the military system. Among his intellectual friends was Stefan Zweig (1881-1942). Inspired by Tolstoy, Stefan Zweig wrote his novel “Der Zwang” (Der Refractair) about a conscientious objector in 1918, translated Rolland's drama “The time will come” into German language in 1919. He was invited to the official celebrations of Tolstoy's 100th birthday in 1928. In 1928, he wrote a magnificent portrait of Tolstoy which was later published in “Master Builders: A Typology of the Spirit” (New York 1939).

Continued

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Notes

See the bibliography Peace in Print for references to Leo Tolstoy and the other gentlemen mentioned here.

1. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion, on life, thoughts on God and on the meaning of life, transl. by Leo Wiener (Complete Works, Vol.16), My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 22, ch. III

2. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 25, III

3. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 35, III

4. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 36, IV

5. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 37, IV

6. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 40, IV

7. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 41, IV

8. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 41f., IV

9. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 42, IV

10. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 43, IV

11. Leo Tolstoy: My Religion (1884), Boston 1904, p. 44, IV

12. Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), p. 7, II

13. Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), p. 7, III

14. William Lloyd Garrison: Declaration of Sentiments (adopted by the Peace Convention, held in Boston, September 18,19 and 20, 1838) (quoted by Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You. Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life (1893), New York 1894, pp. 4f., ch.I) (William Lloyd Garrison: Selections from Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison, Boston 1852, pp. 72-77) - footnotes 12 to 16: Garrison and Ballou quoted from: Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence, Philadelphia 1987, pp. 287-302 -

15. William Lloyd Garrison: Declaration of Sentiments (adopted by the Peace Convention, held in Boston, September 18,19 and 20, 1838) (quoted in Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 6, ch.I)

16. William Lloyd Garrison: Declaration of Sentiments (adopted by the Peace Convention, held in Boston, September 18,19 and 20, 1838) (quoted in Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, pp. 6f., ch.I)

17. Adin Ballou: The Catechism of Non-Resistance (quoted in Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 15, ch.I)

18. Adin Ballou: The Catechism of Non-Resistance (quoted in Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is Within You, pp. 15f., ch.I)

19. Rolland and Tagore, ed. by Alex Aronson and Krishna Kripalani, Visva-Bharati, Calcutta, September 1945, pp. 20-24

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*This article is written by Christian Bartolf.
*Contribution to the 2nd International Conference "Tolstoy and World Literature" in Yasnaya Polyana and Tula (Russia) from August 12 to 28, 2000. The International Journal of Humanities and Peace (IJHP).
Visit the website http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/tolstoj/tolstoy.htm

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Appreciating the Mind, Soul, and Art of Russia’s Greatest Novelist

“The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all its beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth."
- Leo Tolstoy, "Sevastopol in May", 1855.

What makes Leo Tolstoy relevant even today, even to the most contemporary audience, is that Tolstoy was not just a great writer. He was also a great and inspirational teacher of life. Leo Tolstoy wanted his books to be read by everybody, not just by a select few. Tolstoy’s writing is remarkably unstuffy. He wrote fiction to share his insatiable love of life and to tackle the eternal questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What will make me happy? Tolstoy doesn’t give readers the answers to life’s vexing problems, but he gives you something even more valuable. He gives readers such an appreciation of the truth and totality of life that you feel enlarged as a human being. After you read Tolstoy, you feel spiritually uplifted and intellectually empowered to seek out the answers to life’s vexing questions on your own.

Professor Andy takes you on a journey through the mind, soul, and art Russia’s greatest novelist. In his writing and speaking about Tolstoy, Andy combines both scholarly expertise and strong passion, and he talks about Tolstoy in the same way that Tolstoy himself wrote about life: with honesty, clarity, and deep sensitivity.




ACTUAL LIVING VOICE of Leo Tolstoy

What you are about to hear is not a fabrication. It is not an imitation. It is the ACTUAL LIVING VOICE of Leo Tolstoy, recorded in 1909 on one the very first gramophones ever to exist in Russia.
Witness World History in the Making!


In this audio selection Tolstoy reads from his famous religious-spiritual essay, "Thoughts for Everyday." Tolstoy, who knew English, French, and German, translated the passage himself, and he speaks in English with a Russian accent. Listen and follow along in the text below:

“That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou should’st have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?”

AUTHENTIC VOICE RECORDINGS OF LEO TOLSTOY

Tolstoy Reads His Fairy Tale, "The Wolf"


Tolstoy loved to entertain children with fairy tales about exotic people, animals, and even vegetables. The picture to the left shows Tolstoy making his grandchildren laugh with a story about a cucumber -- yes a cucumber! Click PLAY to listen in as Tolstoy reads from another one of his famous fairy tales, "The Wolf."



Tolstoy Teaches the Peasant Children on His Estate


Tolstoy believed that quality education should be available to everybody, not just to the priviledged few. That’s why he created a school for peasant children on his Yasnaya Polyana estate and helped to create libraries in his local community. The picture to the left shows Tolstoy at the inauguration of “The Library for the People” he helped to found at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy died only a few months after this picture was taken.


Tolstoy Reads from His Famous Essay, “I Cannot Be Silent”

Tolstoy was a passionate social activist, who used the power of his pen to fight social injustices and human rights violations in Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One powerful essay, which became known internationally, was called “I Cannot Be Silent.” In this essay Tolstoy expressed his moral outrage over the government’s policy of executing criminals and political dissidents. The event that finally compelled Tolstoy to write the essay was the court's decision in 1908 to execute twenty peasants who assaulted their landowner. Tolstoy was 80 years old at the time.

Authentic Film Footage of Leo Tolstoy!
History comes alive in this authentic film footage of Leo Tolstoy celebrating his eightieth birthday party in 1908. Tolstoy is depicted here with his wife, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya (picking flowers in the garden), his daughter, Aleksandra L’vovna (sitting in the carriage in the white blouse), his aide and confidante, V. Chertkov (the bald man with the beard and mustache), his dog (a spaniel-poodle), and his peasant students who have come to celebrate Tolstoy’s birthday with him. Shot on one of the first film cameras in Russia, this rare glimpse into world history is certain to excite and inspire.

The short film presented here was shot on L. N. Tolstoy's eightieth birthday (August 28, 1908) by one of the early pioneers of Russian cinema, Aleksandr Osipovich Drankov, and his two assistants, I. S. Frolov and V. Vasil'ev. It was the first film taken of Tolstoy.

It was obtained from the Russian State Documentary Film & Photo Archive and digitized by Eric W. Hoffman at the Media Center of Stetson University. The Tolstoy Studies Journal holds non-exclusive copyright over its use.

The film opens with Tolstoy's relatives and friends riding through the territory of Yasnaya Polyana on a light carriage, delivering a box of presents for peasant children. I believe the woman riding in the middle of the carriage (in the white blouse) is Aleksandra L'vovna, Tolstoy's third daughter. The following scene finds Tolstoy's wife, Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, collecting flowers from the flower garden. The Tolstoys' beloved dog (a spaniel-poodle mix) makes a brief appearance. Next, V. Chertkov, Tolstoy's aide and close friend, distributes alms at the "tree of the poor". Chertkov appears in several of the scenes: he is the bald man with a beard and mustache, sometimes wearing an English bowler. Among the men leaving the main house with Chertkov are the Tolstoys' sons. You can also spy another of Drankov's cameras set up near the house. The last scenes are of Tolstoy: In the penultimate scene, Tolstoy, who was suffering from leg pain at the time, is seated on the second-floor balcony, in a low wicker chair, barely visible over the railing. The men to the left are students who have come to congratulate Tolstoy on his birthday. Chertkov stands immediately behind Tolstoy, and Sofia Andreevna stands to the right. The final scene is taken from the balcony. Tolstoy smiles at the camera, his ailing leg propped on an ottoman. Sofia Andreevna stands to his right, Chertkov behind him, and Aleksandra L'vovna can be seen to Tolstoy's left.

Watch the film:

For slow connections: Small picture, low quality image
Window's Media Player version
Quicktime Version

For fast connections: Large picture, high quality image
Window's Media Player version
Quicktime Version


You will need the Window's Media Player or Quicktime Player to watch this short film. If the file does not properly launch, you might try to right-click on the link with your mouse and choose the "save link target as" option. Once the file is finished downloading, you can double-click the icon.

There are several accounts of the shooting of this film: The most detailed is in Lev Anninsky’s «Oxota na Lva» (Tula: Shar, 1998), p. 14-20. Another can be found in Jay Leyda's Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 33. You can read another account, published in the New York Times, of the day's events and Tolstoy's reaction to cinema here, on the Tolstoy Studies website.

Michael A. Denner,
Tolstoy Studies Website Editor
Source: http://www.utoronto.ca/

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This article is taken from http://www.professorandy.com/LeoTolstoy.shtml. Visit the link to see the film and hear the voice.

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Leo Tolstoy Life and Works

[476] Tolstoi, Lev Nikolaevich (1828-1910), writer, was born 9 September 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his family's estate, 200 km south of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children born to Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoi (died 1837) and Mariya Nikolaevna, née Princess Volkonskaya (died 1830). In 1847 Tolstoi received Yasnaya Polyana in the distribution of his parents' property. Thereafter, although occasionally absent (especially in the 1850s) for extended periods, he maintained the estate as his home. In 1862 he married Sofiya Andreevna Bers (born 1844), the daughter of a Moscow physician. Thirteen children were born of the marriage, ten of whom survived infancy. Tolstoi left Yasnaya Polyana for the last time in November 1910. He contracted pneumonia on his journey and died of heart failure on 20 November, aged 82, in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo (today called "Lev Tolstoi").


Educated and cared for by tutors, Tolstoi's early childhood was typical for his social class. He showed a gift for languages and a fondness for literature, including fairy tales, the poems of Pushkin, and the Bible, especially the Old Testament story of Joseph. After their father's death the children passed through the hands of a number of female relatives, finally (1841) being sent to five with an aunt in the provincial city of Kazan. In 1844 Tolstoi enrolled in the local university and began a notably unsuccessful career as a student. He did, however, develop a keen interest in moral philosophy. He steeped himself in the writings of Rousseau. He later listed Dickens, Schiller, Pushkin, Lermontov, D. V. Grigorovich, Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, and Laurence Sterne, especially A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, as also having made a "great impression" on him as a young man.


He left the University in 1847 without a degree and settled at Yasnaya Polyana. In 1851 he went to the Caucasus to join his brother Nikolai who was serving there in the army. He became a commissioned officer himself in 1854, serving first on the Danube and later in the Crimea. While in the army he began his literary career. His first published work, Childhood, appeared pseudonymously in The Contemporary (Russ. Sovremennik) in 1852 and was greeted by general acclaim. It was followed by a sequel, Boyhood, and a number of tales of military life. When, in 1856, Tolstoi retired from the army and went

[477] to live in St. Petersburg, his reputation as a writer was already very considerable. He took an active part in literary circles and made the acquaintance of the leading writers and critics of the day. He was much in demand in the fashionable salons of the city. Stories of various types flowed from his pen.

He soon discovered, however, that he got on badly with his fellow writers and disliked his life as a literary celebrity. In 1857 he made his first trip abroad, and by 1859 he had decided to abandon literature in favor of more "useful" pursuits. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana to devote himself to the management of his estate and to the education of the children of his serfs. Thus began Tolstoi's first pedagogical interlude. He established a school at Yasnaya Polyana, and, in 1860 and 1861, he traveled extensively in order to acquaint himself with European, especially German, educational theory and practice. He resumed teaching on his return, but in 1862 he handed the bulk of the classroom duties over to others. He took upon himself the writing and publication of a periodical describing his theory of education and the pedagogical practice of his school. Twelve issues of Yasnaya Polyana appeared in 1862 and 1863. Tolstoi formulated his ideas most strikingly in "Who Should Learn to Write from Whom, the Peasant Children from Us or We from the Peasant Children?" ("Komu u kogo uchit'sya pisat', krest'yanskim rebyatam u nas, ill nam u krest'yanskikh rebyat?").

After his marriage Tolstoi became increasingly preoccupied with estate management, bent on achieving the ideal of the well-regulated life of a prosperous country squire. He published The Cossacks, a novel on which he had been working at intervals for ten years, in order to pay his outstanding gambling debts and enable him to enter into married life with balanced account books. Shortly thereafter he began his first long novel, War and Peace, a work of colossal proportions which occupied him until 1869.

In 1870 Tolstoi once again turned his back on literature and began a second period of preoccupation with pedagogical work. Over the next five years he wrote and compiled materials for a complete course of elementary education. He tested them in his school and revised them. The final versions were published in 1875 as The New Primer (Novaya azbuka) and The Russian Readers (Russkie knigi diya chteniya). Tolstoi's materials eventually met with fairly general acceptance and were widely used in the nation's schools.

In 1873 Tolstoi's thoughts turned once again to literature, and in the course of the next four years he 'wrote his second long novel, Anna Karenina. His work on the later parts of the novel was disturbed by ever more frequent fits of emotional distress. This condition was brought on by his inability to find an acceptable answer to the question: "What meaning can a person's life have which would not be annihilated by the awful inevitability of death?" Tolstoi became more and more convinced that the bitter truth was that life is meaningless, that there is no escape from the power of death. By the mid-1870s Tolstoi was occasionally so depressed that he entertained thoughts of suicide. By 1878, however, his "crisis" had culminated in what is customarily referred to as a "conversion" to the ideals of human life and conduct which he found in the teaching of Jesus.



Tolstoi described the period of crisis and conversion in his Confession (Ispoved', 1882). The censor forbade its publication, a fate shared by many of Tolstoi's subsequent writings. Tolstoi regarded Confession as his first step along a new road in life, one which he hoped was secure from the lurking menace of the power of death. To Tolstoi the crisis and conversion meant a break with his past, especially his literary past. The convention of dividing his career into two parts (using 1878 as the year of demarcation) has a definite basis in the facts of his life, at least as these were understood by Tolstoi himself. It should not be forgotten, however, that most of the preoccupations, themes, purposes, and style of the "old" Tolstoi are present with greater or lesser clarity already in the work of the "young" Tolstoi.

Confession was, more specifically, the introduction to a group of three books on religion, written in the years 1880 to 1883 and thereafter considered by Tolstoi to be his most important work. The first volume, A Study of Dogmatic Theology (Issledovanie dogmaticheskogo bogosloviya), is a sustained polemic against the teachings of the established church. The second, A Harmony and Translation of the Four Gospels (Soedinenie i perevod chetyrekh evangelii), was Tolstoi's greatest religious labor. This heavily annotated work of [477] exegesis demonstrates both his thorough acquaintance with the French, German, English, and Russian biblical scholarship of the 19th century and his fluent command of New Testament Greek. Tie last part of the religious trilogy is What I Believe (V chem moya vera), a reasoned statement of Tolstoi's version of the Christian teaching.

Tolstoi devoted the remainder of his life to the propagation of his religious views in publicistic essays, works of fiction, and in personal contacts with visitors and through correspondence. He dealt with a variety of subjects in his essays. On Life (O zhizni, 1886-87) offers the most extended discussion of that dualism of body (the "animal life of man") and spirit (the "true life") which is the philosophical heart of his teaching. What Then Should We Do? (Tak chto zhe nam delat'?, 1886) begins with a gruesomely realistic portrait of the poverty of the Moscow slums, which Tolstoi had observed firsthand while helping conduct the Moscow census of 1882. He advocates the abolition of the use of money in favor of the direct exchange of services and the disestablishment of private property rights. He condemns philanthropy as a symptom of "the willingness of the rich to do everything for the poor except to get off their backs." The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas, 1893) takes up two favorite themes: non-resistance to evil and anarchism. This work was among the several written by Tolstoi which had a profound influence on Mohandas Gandhi. In What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?, 1898) Tolstoi gives a detailed account of his aesthetic thought. He also wrote many briefer essays on such subjects as the nature of religion, vegetarianism, famine relief (in which he took an active part in the early 1890s), and on the evils of alcohol and tobacco, patriotism, military conscription, war, terrorism (as practiced both by terrorists and by governments), and capital punishment.

Tolstoi resumed literary activity in the mid-1880s with a series of stories written for the popular audience (i.e., for the common people, especially the peasants). To facilitate the publication and distribution of the "Stories for the People" he and his friend and disciple V. G. Chertkov founded (1884) a non‑profit publishing house which they called The Intermediary (Posrednik). Tolstoi also developed an interest in the drama and wrote his only major play, The Power of Darkness. The leading examples of Tolstoi's fiction written for the educated audience also reflect his religious teachings. These include the short novels The Death of Ivan llyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Master and Man. He also wrote two more novels, Resurrection and Hadji-Murad, and more than a dozen short stories.

The last ten years of Tolstoi's life were marred by intermittent ill health. He devoted such strength as remained to him chiefly to the compilation of vast compendia of morally and spiritually elevating extracts from the writings of sages of various epochs and cultures. These miscellanies reflect both Tolstoi's wide reading in the world's wisdom literature and his lack of temerity in bending or adjusting the words of others to suit his own purposes. The largest of these compilations are The Cycle of Reading (Krug chteniya, 1904-08), For Every Day (Na kazhdyi den', 1907-10), and The Way of Life (Put' zhizni, 1910). Although not expressly so described by Tolstoi, the miscellanies represent his version of the "perennial philosophy," the concept of which had been central to his view of religion from the early 1880s and even before.


Tolstoi was the best-known Russian in the world during the last decade of his life. Tolstoian communities sprang up throughout Europe and in the United States. He was described in the newspapers as "the sage of Yasnaya Polyana" and "the conscience of humanity." His vast correspondence touched hundreds of people at a distance and many more came to visit him each year. He was a constant irritant to the authorities. His associates suffered exile and other manifestations of the government's displeasure, and he was himself excommunicated from the Orthodox Church in 1901. Most of the works written after 1880 were either banned outright or mutilated by the censor. His public stature in Russia and abroad, however, was such that his person, even in times of vigorous repression, remained inviolable. At home he was the center of a distasteful competition between his disciples, led by Chertkov, and his family, mainly his wife. Sofiya Andreevna made frequent and covert nocturnal searches of his private papers. It was the experience of lying sleepless in his darkened bedroom listening to his wife rustling through his papers in his study next door that finally prompted him

[479] to leave Yasnaya Polyana for good and embark on the journey which ended in his death.

Tolstoi was a multi-dimensional man. In his long career he had been a teacher and educational theorist, a philosopher and social critic, a successful farmer and paterfamilias, a soldier, and a prophet. Above all, however, he was a great artist, and it is on his fiction that his fame at present rests. The literary career of this "great writer of the Russian land" (as his contemporary Turgenev called him) may be divided into three parts: the early period of literary apprenticeship (1851-63), the period of the great novels (1863-77), and the later period of preoccupation with the message of his religious teaching (1878-1910).

The works of the early period may be regarded as the "school" in which Tolstoi taught himself to write. He isolated the themes and developed the literary techniques which characterize his more mature writings. The spirit of trial and error is reflected in the journal which he began in 1847 and continued to keep, with greater or lesser regularity, throughout the remainder of his life. The journals, especially those of the 1850s, are one of the richest sources for the study of the development of Tolstoi's literary style, so much so that their reliability as sources of biographical detail has always to be assessed in the light of the fact that they are also (according to some views, primarily) the record of his literary experiments.

Tolstoi's first substantial literary endeavor, "The History of Yesterday" ("Istoriya vcherashnego dnya") reflects the psychological self-analysis characteristic of the journals. Written in 1851, it was not submitted for publication, perhaps because its young author feared that its originality would occasion public rejection. The story is an account of the sequence of thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of the protagonist in the course of a single day. Tolstoi's fascination with the operation of the psyche found a more conventional outlet in Childhood (Detstvo, 1852), where it is cloaked in the format, familiar to contemporary readers, of childhood reminiscences. Childhood and its sequels, Boyhood (Otrochestvo, 1854) and Youth (Yunost', 1857), were conceived as parts of a tetralogy to be called The Four Ages of Development (the fourth volume was never written). The spontaneous impressions of the child as child alternate with the analysis of those impressions by the child grown up. The result is a combination of the lyrical representation of the memories of childhood (typical of the genre) and a detached, quasi-scientific investigation of the operations and growth of the conscious mind at various stages of its development.

The Trilogy (as the three novels are collectively called) abounds with autobiographical material, a feature characteristic also of Tolstoi's later works. Another noteworthy element is the unconcealed presence of the author's voice (the author as narrator), i strategy which Tolstoi seems to have adopted on the basis of his fascination with the work of Sterne. Boyhood and Youth continue the account of the child-hero's development through his late teens. In the former he discovers philosophy, and considerable attention is given to the phenomenon of the paralysis of the will when it seeks to be guided by reason alone. The distinction drawn here between the enervation arising from abstract mentation and the more practical philosophy in which the head and the heart cooperate remained thereafter a prominent motif in many of Tolstoi's works, e.g., the tension between "reason" and "consciousness" in War and Peace. Youth concerns the hero's education in manners and concentrates on the theme of social comme il faut, a favorite target also in War and Peace (the characters of Berg and Vera) and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Tolstoi's tales of military fife reflect his experiences in the Caucasus and the Crimea. "The Raid" (Nabeg, 1853) and "The Woodfelling" (Rubka lesa, 1855) belong superficially to the familiar Russian genre of the Caucasian military tale. They contain an indirect polemic with the romantic clichés of fearless heroism, the glory of battle, and exaggerated patriotism characteristic of such earlier practitioners of the genre as Aleksandr Bestuzhev (Marlinsky). Tolstoi reduced the conventional exciting plots of such stories to the level of mere incidents which he used as a framework to display his true interest, a neatly categorized series of psychological portraits of the Russian soldiers and officers and their opponents, the mountain tribesmen. The stories blend the traditional Caucasian military tale of the 1820s with the strategies and devices characteristic of the Natural School of the 1840s. Tolstoi's interest in the latter, be-

[478] spoken by his high opinion of Grigorovich (a leading practitioner of the "Physiological sketch"). is also reflected in "Notes of a Billiard Marker" (Zapiski markera, 1855) with its use of skaz (i.e., the interposition of a narrative persona, usually one with a "local color" value and characterized by dialectal or sub-literary speech, between author and reader), and "The Snowstorm" (Metel', 1856), a physiological sketch of the Russian coachman.

The three Sevastopol Stories ("Sevastopol' v dekabre mesyatse," 1855; "Sevastopol' v mae," 1855; "Sevastopol' v avguste 1855 goda," 1856) are difficult to classify. They represent a blend of fiction and reportage with a startling admixture (in "Sevastopol in December") of the stylistic conventions of a tourist guidebook. They also (especially "Sevastopol in May") make extended use of the narrative device of stream of consciousness ("the dialectic of the soul" as it was called by the critic N. G. Chernyshevsky) with which Tolstoi had first experimented in "The History of Yesterday." The stories, especially the first of them, display the characteristically Tolstoian device of estrangement whereby familiar sights and events are made to seem new and striking by distorting or ignoring the conventions which usually govern our perception of them. This descriptive technique was to become a hallmark of Tolstoi's style. The loci classici are the account of Natasha at the opera in War and Peace, the description of the service in the prison church in Resurrection, and the ridiculing of the rehearsal of a Wagnerian opera in What Is Art? Finally, it was in "Sevastopol in May" that Tolstoi proclaimed that the "hero" of his fiction was not any of the characters who appeared in it but rather that which "I love with all the power of my soul" and which "has been, is, and will be beautiful," namely, The Truth.

The stories of the later 1851)3 illustrate several more of the themes and devices which became characteristic of Tolstoi's work. He had already touched upon death and various attitudes toward it in the Trilogy and the military tales. He devoted "Three Deaths" (Tri smerti, 1859) exclusively to this subject. The story describes the pain and anxiety attendant on the death of a wealthy noblewoman, the patient and uncomplaining acceptance of his death by a poor coachman, and the death of a tree. Despite his physical suffering, the coachman dies with less anguish than the noblewoman. The death of the tree is the least painful, because the tree is unaware that it is dying.

"Three Deaths" makes its point through comparison and contrast of the experiences of its three protagonists. This device, ubiquitous in Tolstoi's work, also forms the structural basis of "Two Hussars" (Dva gusara, 1856). He describes incidents from the lives of two Hussar officers, father and son. The comparison is distinctly unflattering to the younger generation, as the "progressive" critics of the time were quick to note and regret. They saw the story as proof of Tolstoi's disaffection from the liberal cause and of his recalcitrance in the face of their demand for literary works which would reflect modern ideas and ideals. Tolstoi added offense to innuendo with two stories based upon the experiences of his first trip to Europe. "Lucerne" (Iz zapisok knyazya D. Nekhlyudova. Lyutsern, 1857) contains a diatribe against the moral shortcomings of the values of "civilized" Europeans (especially the English) as compared with their rural brethren, and reminds us of Tolstoi's continuing interest in the ideas of Rousseau. "Albert" (1858) expresses the idea that art is valuable in itself and not merely as a medium for the communication of ideological or social concerns.


Tolstoi worked on The Cossacks (Kazaki, 1863) throughout the entire period of his literary apprenticeship, and it reflects the whole range of themes and stylistic techniques which then preoccupied him. The novel breaks new ground as well. More comprehensively and directly than in any other of his early works, Tolstoi here delves into the theme of the relationship between the individual and the group. The hero's (Olenin) inability to find a satisfying place for himself, the unattached individual, either in the Moscow society which he leaves at the beginning of the novel or the Cossack village which he leaves at the end is a foretaste of the investigation of the role of the individual in the context of the historical and social collective which Tolstoi will conduct in War and Peace and Anna Karenina.


The foundation of Tolstoi's reputation is the work of his middle period (1863-77). It was then that he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both of which are, by common consent, well up on the list of the greatest novels ever written. War and Peace defies facile categorization. It is a sui generic combination of the psychological novel, the Bildungsroman, the family novel, and the historical novel, with a liberal admixture of the scope and tone of the epic. Set amidst the historical conflict between the France of Napoleon and the Russia of Alexander I, it deals primarily with the events of the years 1805 to 1812 and ends with an epilogue set in about 1820. Against a backdrop of alternating periods of peace and war Tolstoi unfolds the stories of the Bolkonsky and Rostov families, and of Pierre Bezukhov.

The novel's epic qualities are most prominent in the account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. All the classes of Russian society (with the exception of some portions of the St. Petersburg elite) unite in the defense of the homeland and in a spirit of national solidarity. On the family level it is the Rostovs who are the primary bearers of the epic spirit: the naturalness and spontaneity of Natasha; the courage and devotion of Nikolai; the scenes, most of which are associated with the Rostovs, of feasting and hunting, singing and dancing.


The novel as Bildungsroman is preoccupied with the moral and psychological growth of Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov. Andrei passes from dreams of military glory to disillusionment, from dreams of honor in the career of statesman to disillusionment, from dreams of love to a final disillusionment which ends in a death which is, at least in part, a voluntary withdrawal from "vital life." Pierre's road is similarly bumpy. He passes, with intermediate periods of despair, from sensuality to Freemasonry and philanthropy to mysticism. At last he seems to find the truth which he has sought in the example of the peasant soldier Platon Karataev. In the "First Epilogue," however, it is suggested that Pierre has begun to slip away from that truth, too, as from its predecessors. Unlike Andrei, but like the novel itself, he continues along the undulating curve of life, from indeterminate beginnings to an indefinite and unspecifiable end.

The various aspects of War and Peace are united in a variety of ways. Tolstoi interweaves the fates of the fictional characters and connects them to those of the historical personages. The novel as a whole is marked by the vividness, fullness, and plasticity of description which is recognized as the hallmark of the Tolstoian manner. Life itself is, in a way, the unifying hero of this multi-dimensional book and Tolstoi is everywhere fascinated with its various aspects (youth and age, peace and war, mind and spirit, reason and intuition, the individual and the swarm) and its key moments: birth, love, and death. He raises many questions and explores many answers.



In one of its dimensions War and Peace is a historical novel. As a whole, however, it would be better described as a novel about history. Especially in the later parts of the novel proper and in the "Second Epilogue" Tolstoi is preoccupied with the investigation of the forces that move history. His primary target is the "great-man" theory of historical causation, both in direct argument and in his portrayal of Napoleon (the epitome of the great man) as limited ineffectual, and essentially powerless to control the movement of history. The Russian commander Kutuzov, the salutary contrast to the pretentious Napoleon, succeeds precisely because he seeks to accommodate himself to the flow and flux of history rather than trying to manipulate it.



The "Second Epilogue" of War and Peace extends the discussion of historical causation into the realm of the more general philosophic question of freedom and necessity, a topic which was to retain a vital interest for Tolstoi throughout the remainder of his career. In reading Tolstoi, "freedom" and "necessity" can be understood as rubrics which summarize nearly all of his central thematic concerns. Under "freedom" come consciousness, life, the individual; under "necessity" fall reason (i.e., logic without intuition), death, the group. War and Peace explores the role of the individual within the group conceived of as the historical mass. Here is another unifying factor in the novel, for Tolstoi presents not only the involvement of the historical characters in the great events of history but that of the fictional characters as well. They all face situations which exemplify the tension between the immediacy of the individual's sense of freedom as individual and the feelings of powerlessness and constraint within the group. The intuitive freedom perceived by consciousness does battle with the indubitable ne-



[479] cessity proven by reason, and from this war not one of the leading characters is allowed, in fife, an unbroken peace. The same questions, cloaked in a different setting and explored in the context of another dimension of the "group," emerge again in Tolstoi's second great novel.



Anna Karenina is an account of two marriages. The story of the ruin of Anna's in her adulterous affair with Count Aleksei Vronsky alternates with the story of the courtship and family life of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya. The two main characters, Anna and Levin, are brought together on only one occasion, however, so that while it is easy to see the contrast between these two characters and their respective fates, it is more difficult to understand the sense in which they are also comparable to one another.



At the beginning of the novel Anna is a highly respected member of society. She enters into a love affair and finds herself unable to conduct it discreetly. She abhors hypocrisy and deceit. She cannot be content with the stolen moments of passion in which so many of the women and men of her acquaintance indulge. Anna is caught between the power of the passionate "aliveness" within her and the equally pressing demands of the society to which she belongs. She finds herself in the position of serving two masters: her individuality, with its striving for freedom and self‑expression through love, and her social self, with its need to belong to an authentic group context. As she herself says, she is, in her affair, "guilty, and yet not to blame." Anna commits suicide when she becomes convinced that Vronsky, the only remnant of social context remaining to her, wishes to leave her.



Levin's course is the reverse of Anna's. He begins as an acknowledged "outsider," an independent individualist, and gradually becomes ever more enmeshed in the web of social and familial constraints. Like Anna, he senses the tension between the force of his individual ideals and the obstructions of recalcitrant social reality. Unlike her, he finds a middle course which allows him to function with the social group while yet retaining a part of himself, what he calls on the last page of the novel his soul's "holy of holies," under his absolute control. In this hidden part of himself he is neither constrained nor obstructed by his continuing attachment to the group. His life, in this respect at least, is "full of the meaning with which I have the power to invest it."



In this respect the stories of Anna and Levin are truly comparable. Both experience the frustration of having their expression of themselves as individuals thwarted by an unmanageable social reality. As in War and Peace Tolstoi had shown the powerlessness of individuals to force historical reality to conform to their own ambitions and plans, so here he explores their inability to realize the ideals of the free imagination in the context of society and the family. Although the group is of a different order of magnitude, the question is the same: wherein is a person free, wherein subject to the constraints of necessity. The hopeful implication of War and Peace that people are at least relatively free in the context of their personal and familial affairs is replaced in Anna Karenina by the suggestion that they are really free only within themselves, in that "holy of holies" which they alone may enter.



Tolstoi devoted rest of the first seven years of his later period (1878-1910) to non-fictional writing. When, in 1885, he returned once again to literature, he was determined to forswear the "nonsense" of his former style and to make all his fictional works conveyances for the message of the Christian teaching as he understood it. He distinguished between the educated and the popular audiences, and his first literary efforts were intended for the latter.



Tolstoi's primary problem in writing "for the people" was to devise a style that was both accessible to them and commensurate with his artistic standards. He employed narrative models and subjects familiar from fairy tales, religious legends, and proverbs. He trimmed his customarily complex literary style to the bare bones, much as be had in the stories, especially "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" (Bog pravdu vidit, da ne skoro skazhet, 1872), written for The Russian Readers. To this simplified base he added, through appropriate lexical and syntactic selection, either a folkish or Biblical flavor. He consulted a well-known teller of folktales and was in the habit of eavesdropping on the conversations of simple folk in search of choice words and phrases. The stylistic innovation produced by these efforts is the chief glory of the collection of moral exempla which Tolstoi called his Stories for the People. They represent a,



genre unto themselves within Tolstoi's work and include such gems as "What Men Live By" (Chem lyudi zhivy, 1882), "Where Love Is, God Is" (Gde lyubov', tam i Bog, 1885), "Two Old Men" (Dva starika, 1885), "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno?, 1885), and "The Three Hermits" (Tri startsa, 1886).



Tolstoi's concern to bring the message of his teaching to the popular audience also led him into dramatic work. There were efforts afoot in the mid‑1880s to develop a repertory of plays suitable for production in "popular" theaters. Tolstoi, who had experimented briefly with and then abandoned the drama in the 1860s, was invited to contribute. In response he wrote The Power of Darkness (Vlast' t'my, 1886). This peasant tragedy, its five acts neatly apportioned to rising action, climax, and denouement, is constructed very much in the classical manner. As it happened, it was not produced for the popular audience, but it had a notable theatrical success in the 1890s under the direction of K. S. Stanislavsky. It has since remained a fixture of the Russian repertory. Tolstoi's several later plays do not reach the level of The Power of Darkness. The best known is The Fruits of Enlightenment (Plody prosveshcheniya, 1889-90), a comedy in which Tolstoi ridicules the spiritualism which was fashionable in the 1880s.



The major literary achievements of Tolstoi's later period are to be found among the works which he wrote for the educated audience. Like the Stories for the People, these works are nearly all invested with the teaching; unlike them, they are written in a style which is much more typically Tolstoian. Tolstoi seems to have felt that his peers were in need of instruction mainly with respect to the themes of death and sex, subjects which appear rarely and never, respectively, in the Stories for the People. The theme of death evoked the short novels The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Smert' Ivana II'icha, 1886) and Master and Man (Khozyain i rabotnik, 1895). Both portray the encounter between a solid, respectable citizen and his death, an encounter which reveals that the very solidity and respectability of the lives of the protagonists was what was most wrong with them. Both works are painstakingly structured, densely allusive, and profoundly symbolic. It is here that Tolstoi best succeeded in converting the raw material of his religious teaching into genuine works of art. The stories on the theme of sex are less well realized from the artistic point of view. The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserova sonata, 1889) aroused a storm of controversy. Tolstoi was accused of advocating a celibacy so complete that it would, if practiced, result in the extinction of the human race. The pernicious results of sexual attraction are also the focus of The Devil (D'yavol, 1890 unfinished) and Father Sergius (Otets Sergii, 1898).



Tolstoi's last long novel, Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899) occupied him intermittently for eleven years. He published it to raise money for the transportation of the Dukhobors, a Christian sect with whose style of life he sympathized, to Canada. It is generally conceded that Resurrection does not compare well with its predecessors, and Tolstoi himself felt that the novel was published before it had reached a fully satisfactory state of readiness. In Resurrection Tolstoi attempts to provide a comprehensive account of the ills of contemporary society as seen from the vantage point of his religious teaching. The church, the government, the institution of private property, the judicial and penal system, the conventions of upper-class social life: all are mercilessly attacked and ridiculed. Tolstoi uses his considerable gifts as a satirist with telling effect. Resurrection is also Tolstoi's final fictional word on the perplexing question of freedom and necessity. He had left Levin (in Anna Karenina) in a state marked by the coexistence of an external, physiological obeisance to the laws of determinism and a spiritual, but wholly internalized, sense of freedom and individual worth. The hero of Resurrection, Prince Dmitry Nekhlyudov, strives to resolve this contradiction by externalizing the dictates of his spiritual consciousness. He abandons his position in society, turns his property over to his peasants, and follows the heroine (for whose ruin he feels responsible) into her Siberian exile. For the later Tolstoi the mere recognition of the spiritual essence of man is no longer enough, even when (as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich) the recognition is total and entails the complete rejection of a life lived with the spirit submerged. Levin's compromise is replaced by Nekhlyudov's decision to act so as to remove from his life every vestige of dissonance with the commands of the spirit. Freedom seems at last to win its long struggle with



[480] necessity in the work of Tolstoi. The freedom exemplified in Resurrection is the freedom to act in accord with the requirements of the spirit, to control the fears and desires which were, for the later Tolstoi, the necessary adjuncts of the "animal life" of man, and to reject as irrelevant the physical death which was its determined end.

With his last remarkable work of fiction, Hadji-Murad (Khadzhi-Murad, 1904), Tolstoi's literary career seems to come full circle. This novel's Caucasian setting and descriptions of armed conflict and the warrior's life mark a recurrence of themes which had engaged Tol­stoi's interest at the beginning of his career. He himself referred to Hadji-Murad as a return to his former manner of writing. Indeed, its stylistic artifice and the relative absence of the later Tolstoi's cus­tomary moral certitude are hardly in full accord with the principles expressed in What Is Art?. It was perhaps for this reason that Hadji­Murad was held back by Tolstoi and published only after his death.



Works: The definitive edition in Russian: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 90 vols. Ed. V. Chertkov et al. 1928-58.

Translations: Most of Tolstoi's published works have been translated into English, many of them more than once. A good collection is: Oxford Centenary Edition of Tolstoy. 21 vols. Ed. and trans. L. and A. Maude. 1929-37. (The Maudes were friends of Tolstoi and had the benefit of frequent consultation with him. As a general rule, their translations are the most satisfactory of those available.)

Correspondence:

R. F. Christian, ed. and trans., Tolstoy's Letters. 2 vols. 1978.

Biography:

N. N. Gusev, Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva L'va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo. 2 vols. 1958, 1960. [A chronology of the doc­umented facts. For more extensive details see the same author's series:] Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k biografii. 5 vols. to date [the latest by L. D. Opul'skaya]. 1954, 1957, 1963, 1970, 1979. The standard biographies in English are: A. Maude, The Life of Tolstoy. 2 vols. 1930. E. J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy. 1946. Also of interest: A. Tolstoy, Tolstoy: A Life of My Father. 1953.

Bibliography of critical studies:

Russian sources (Soviet period only):

N. G. Shelyapina et al., Bibliografiya literatury o L. N. Tolstom. 3 vols. (Coverage through 1967.] 1960, 1965, 1972.

For criticism in English:

D. R. and M. A. Egan, An Annotated Bibliography of English-language Sources to 1978. 1979.

Secondary literature:

J. Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel. 1966. I.

Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox [concerns War and Peace]. 1953.

S. P. Bychkov, ed., L. N. Tolstoi v russkoi kritike. 1960.

R. F. Christian, Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction. 1969. , Tolstoy's

War and Peace: A Study. 1962.

B. M. Eikhenbaum, Molodoi Tolstoi. 1922. [English translation: The Young Tolstoi (Ann Arbor, 1972)]; Lev Tolstoi. 3 vols. 1928, 1931, 1960 [English translation of the second and third volumes: Tolstoi in the Sixties and Tolstoi in the Seventies (Ann Arbor, 1982)].

G. Gibian, Tolstoj and Shakespeare. 1957.

H. Gifford, ed., Leo Tolstoy [anthology of criticism]. 1971.

N. K. Gudzii, Lev Tolstoi. 1960.

E. N. Kupreyanova, Estetika L. N. Tolstogo. 1966.

K. Leont'ev, Analiz, stil' i veyanie: O romanakh gr. L. N. Tolstogo. 1911.

K. N. Lomunov, Dramaturgiya L. N. Tolstogo. 1956.

R. Matlaw, ed., Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays. 1967.

D. Matual, Tolstoy's Translation of the Gospels: A Study. 1985.

L. M. Myshkovskaya, Masterstvo L. N. Tolstogo. 1958.

V. Shklovskii, Material i stil' v romane L. N. Tolstogo Voina i

mir. 1928.

G. W. Spence, Tolstoy the Ascetic. 1967.

E. Stenbock­Fermor, The Architecture of Anna Karenina. 1975.

E. Wasiolek, Tolstoy's Major Fiction. 1978.

G. R. J.

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[Reprinted here from Handbook of Russian Literature, Victor Terras, ed. (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1985):476-80.]

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