Count Leo Tolstoy’s titanic struggle with religion, politics, art and life

Posted in Famous news stories, Historical articles, History, Literature, Politics, Religion on Friday, 3 February 2012

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This edited article about Tolstoy originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 627 published on 19 January 1974.

Count Leo Tostoy, picture, image, illustration

Count Leo Tolstoy preparing to run away from home at the age of 82

It was still hours before dawn when the master of a large estate named Yasnaya Polyana let himself out of a side door and made his way to the stables, switching his torch on and off uncertainly as he went. Electrical gadgets were still new in 1910 and the torch was unfamiliar. Soon he had fallen in sudden darkness and lost his cap. Back through the biting cold of a Russian November night he went in to fetch another one, then back again to the stables to wake the startled coachman. In silence, the horses were harnessed, and after whispered instructions, luggage was hastily loaded on to the roof.

“Where to, Excellency?”

“The railway station! And quietly! We don’t want to wake your mistress!”

Gently the man coaxed his horses to a walk and the vehicle began to move. In minutes the bulk of the great house was swallowed in the darkness, while the coach’s occupant gave a sigh of satisfaction.

At the age of 82, Count Leo Tolstoy, Russia’s greatest man of letters, was running away from his wife and home.

Many successful writers get pleasure from recounting how they started from the bottom. Tolstoy began at the top. He was born at his father’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Moscow, in 1828, heir to the land, the 40 roomed mansion, the title and the serfs.

Young Tolstoy took it for granted that he owned serfs. After all, didn’t everyone? They were a landowner’s property, like his cattle. Very useful for getting work done about the fields. And cheap, because naturally one didn’t have to pay them.

Tolstoy was still very young when his parents died, and he grew up with his sister and three brothers, in a close and unusually affectionate family group. There were always books, music and intelligent conversation, and nobody thought it strange that young Leo should bury himself in works of philosophy at a very early age. Or that at times his behaviour should be somewhat odd.

He was a boy who liked to think over problems while fishing, employing so much concentration that at lunch times, he was known to serve himself from his worm jar instead of the picnic basket. And it was quite impossible to tell him anything. On one occasion he decided that if he clasped his arms firmly enough round his knees he could fly. Refusing advice to the contrary, he hopped out of an eighteen foot high window and gave himself concussion.

On a bear hunt, friends tried to tell him how to plot his retreat, but as usual Tolstoy paid no attention. Consequently the bear had the young count’s head actually between his jaws before the other hunters came to the rescue.

Yet Tolstoy was capable of learning. One day a farm worker came upon the count beating an exhausted horse. With what must have been remarkable courage, the serf explained that he should stop. The horse was tired, just like a man. Tolstoy was appalled, and burst into tears, crying “I’m sorry, horse! I’m sorry!” That animals and serfs could feel pain just like aristocrats was a new and terrible thought, and one that Tolstoy never forgot.

Judged by the standards of today, the young count sounds mildly insane, whereas in fact he was to spend most of his life trying to get to grips with the fact that his mind was a hundred years ahead of the rest of his strange, outdated Russian world.

Well-read he might be, but Tolstoy failed his university examinations by reason of a weakness for drink and wild living that would overcome him periodically and make him despise himself. But as luck would have it, his failure as a student coincided with his inheritance of Yasnaya Polyana and its 350 serfs.

At last, he had a chance to repent his wild ways! Tolstoy dressed himself up like a peasant, built modern hygienic huts for his serfs and sent their children to school. The serfs were furious. They said their huts were like prisons, and didn’t want their children to waste time at classes. Bitterly disappointed at this ingratitude, Tolstoy joined the army.

Once in uniform, the other side of his nature came to the fore and he became very popular in the officers’ mess. He had good manners, plenty of money, personal courage and a knack of getting into scrapes. He served through the Crimean War and was present at the siege of Sebastopol. Then, encouraged by an aunt to try his hand at writing, he produced first of all a book called “Childhood,” followed by two works based on his army life, “Sebastopol in December” and later, “Sebastopol in May.” The first was full of fiery patriotism and won immediate approval, whereas the latter was full of criticism of the waste and folly of war, and ended up by being heavily censored.

With the end of hostilities, Tolstoy left the army and spent the next five years travelling, writing and arguing with fellow authors. To those who did not know him, it seemed as though he was always trying to prove the rest of the world wrong. In Russia, he was against the government. In France he condemned capital punishment. In England, he criticised culture as a whole. In fact, what he was really against was himself. He felt guilty of his wealth and guilty of being an aristocrat. In the end he went back to Yasnaya Polyana, determined to free his serfs.

Typically, Tolstoy had left his big decision so late that he arrived to find that the keeping of bonded serfs had finally become illegal anyway. Equally typically, his return reminded him that he had sold the house some time before in order to pay a gambling debt. There was only one wing left, the remainder having been removed by its new owner and reassembled some miles away. In no way dismayed, Tolstoy settled down on the land he still owned and, at the age of 34, married a pleasant and long suffering girl named Sonia Behrs.

Sonia found herself the wife of a man who seemed to be two people. There was an arrogant count who wanted to be a peasant, a lover of wild parties who yearned after saintliness and an admired thinker and author who only seemed happy in the company of children.

A year after his marriage, Tolstoy decided that the good and bad sides of his nature, his own doubts and fears, could serve as the basis for a character in a book. What was more, the setting of the book itself could reflect the eternal battle of good and evil that constantly occupied his thoughts.

Tolstoy spent the next six years turning his ideas into the enormous novel he called “War and Peace.” Then, with excited publishers offering him a fortune for his next work, he busied himself with projects for village schools and the task of learning ancient Greek. Ignoring his wife’s pleas for money, he continued this tranquil life for seven long years. Finally, and probably due to his wife’s goading, this extraordinary man settled down to another book, and in the two years between 1875 and 1877 produced “Anna Karenina.”

What can one say of a man who, having written what is widely considered to be the greatest novel of all time, settled down with rather bad grace and produced the second best? Clearly he was a genius, a literary giant. But equally clearly, he must have been a nightmare to live with.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Tolstoy as a man was that he never changed. He continued to write brilliantly. Year after year he continued his search for spiritual truth. Always, he sought virtue and simplicity, and always it eluded him.

Eventually, the saint-like side of him decided to give away his lands and what was left of his house. But he saw nothing illogical in the fact that the aristocrat in him made him give them away to his wife instead of the peasants, so that he continued to live in exactly the same way as he had done before.

Forty years of marriage to an eccentric genius took their toll of Sonia. Apart from raising a huge family, much of the day-to-day running of the estate had fallen to her. She had even acted as her husband’s secretary, re-writing “War and Peace” in longhand no fewer than seven times.

Eventually the countess’s behaviour became a good deal odder even than that of the count, perhaps with good reason. Certainly she was driven to a frenzy by the fear (which was well founded) that Tolstoy was planning to give away all the rights to his books.

There had been tension between husband and wife for some time, and it was the sound of Sonia going through his papers that proved the last straw so far as the great writer was concerned. He would put up with interference no longer. He would leave home for good.

Tolstoy’s disappearance created an incredible scene, with the countess trying, although not very hard, to throw herself first into the lake, then from a window and finally down a well. For good measure, she stuck pins in herself, while demanding that telegrams should be sent to her husband, so that he should know exactly what was going on.

But Tolstoy was in full flight, heading for the Caucasus he had known as a young man. Then, at the little town of Astapovo, he felt so ill that he could not continue his journey, and five days later he died of pneumonia.

He left a will in which he asked to be buried “in the cheapest cemetery, in the cheapest coffin.” Naturally nobody took any notice, and Tolstoy was buried where his forefathers rested, on the estate at Yasnaya Polyana.

He would probably have been deeply offended if anyone had even thought of burying him anywhere else.

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