Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy is a leading name in the genre of novel. Some of his works, like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, are considered as the finest novels ever written. He was a master of novella as well, and his works are considered a model for comparison by the readers. Along with his influences as a writer, he was also held in great esteem for his religious views. 

He was the one who promoted the idea of non-resistance, and this was adopted by Gandhi. Though his religious ideas are of no interest today, his literary works attract unending readership.

Mathew Arnold referred to his novels as a piece of life, not as a work of art. He has the ability to notice the smallest consciousness and then divide it into minute components. In his later days, when somebody visited him, he/she was disturbed by Tolstoy’s ability to understand the unspoken thoughts. He is seen by many writers and critics not only as a great writer but as an embodiment of search for meaning in life. His works talk about God, women, and peasants.

He had a lifelong interest in morality and did experiments with it throughout his career. He was one of the first authors who employed stream-of-consciousness in their works. He didn’t join any literary camp, and for this reason, he was criticized by the radical members of these groups. His fiction was highly didactic and realistic.

He was taken by existential despair in his later years, and the universe appeared to him like a useless, meaningless void. He turned to religion to overcome this fear. He believed that all churches were corrupt, and this led to his discovery of Christ’s true message. He wrote his own critical works of Christianity and the greater part of the Bible. This led to his own sect of Christianity and followers.

He gave the idea of non-resistance to evil, which was the opposite of the fear that governments used to enforce the law. By giving the opposite to this concept, he gave the rudimentary form of anarchism. There is a satire of the church and the justice system in his works.

Tolstoy had made his own division of art, which was good and bad art. Some of his own novels and Shakespearean works were categorized as bad art because he considered them counterfeit. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth seemed empty works to him. He was a man who gave many innovative features to Literature and religion. He led to the emergence of new schools, proving one of the most influential authors.

A Short Biography of Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, in the Russian Empire on September 28th, 1828. He belonged to an aristocratic family that had relations with some of the most powerful families in Russia. He and Pushkin were from the same family and were fourth cousins. 

His mother died when he was about two years old while his father died soon in 1837. His grandmother died eleven months after the death of his father, and thus their aunt became their guardian who died soon as well.

They were then given in guardianship of another aunt who lived in Kazan. Though in his childhood he saw the deaths of many of his relatives, he saw it as an idyllic period in his life. He always looked at it from a nostalgic perspective. He was educated by tutors at home. For higher education, he enrolled as a student of Oriental languages at the University of Kazan.

 He couldn’t perform well, and for this reason, he was transferred to the law faculty. During this time, he developed an interest in English novelists’ works and French philosopher Rousseau.

During his time at university, he didn’t focus on his studies and instead spent time in debauchery, gambling, and becoming socially correct. He left university in 1847 without earning any degree. He decided to settle on his estate and focus on self-education there. Other aims that he put forth before himself were improving the condition of his serfs and management of his estate. He decided several times to change his life, but he couldn’t and wasted his time.

He joined the Russian army and then fought against the natives and later took part in the Crimean war. He began to write his diary from 1847. This was a source of self-analysis to him, and he wrote it throughout his life. Though there are some short breaks, it still gives a clear picture of his life. In his diaries, there is the mention of his social and religious beliefs, which are non-conformists and sometimes hard to understand.

After the return from his military campaigns, he opened a school for peasant children and began to teach them. He wrote many provocative articles that describe the essence of education and wrong notions attached to it.

He married Sofia Andreyevna Behrs, a girl sixteen years younger to him, in 1862, and from her, he had thirteen children out of whom ten survived infancy. It was in the 1870s when he underwent a major religious conversion, and he changed his beliefs. 

He was influenced by the views of Buddha and Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Under the influence of these views, he promoted the idea of a religious system where there are no churches. For these beliefs, he was later excommunicated by Orthodox Russian Church.

Except for his daughter Aleksandra, his family, including his children, remained aloof from his religious views and even opposed him. He left home with his physician and daughter and died in Astapovo, a railroad station, due to pneumonia and heart failure on November 10th, 1910.

Leo Tolstoy’s Literary Style

Leo Tolstoy’s concise and clear writing makes him one of the most famous authors. Though there are connotations or abstractions in his works still, the lucidity of his style can’t be questioned. In his short stories, we see a moral lesson that is told from different points of view. His diction is conversational, and at some places, there are colloquial phrases. 

There are suggested meanings which can be inferred from the exploitation of connotative meanings. Parallel structures in his syntax can be seen that are used to compare things. His writing is not overly ornate; rather, it is succinct and clear. Irony and syntax add to the mood of the narrator, who describes things in an unusual way.

Attempts to Go Beyond the Social Forms of Life

Russian literature was close to natural organic conditions in the nineteenth century. This gave it a chance to be polemically creative. Tolstoy was born for the novel, and he expressed his epic mentality in it. His characters are bound to nature, and their every step in life is in conformity with it. The historical situation in his novels is paradoxical, which promotes the idea that life can’t be translated into any movement or action. His idea of ‘nature’ is about the inner self and opposed to culture.  

In his great works, the role of culture as a framework and concrete form is problematic, and for this reason, he rejects it. There is a paradoxical relationship between his mentality and the age in which he finds himself. This is seen in the form of the central characters’ dissatisfaction with the world in which they live. He lived a life that gave him a feeling of disconsolateness, which was a result of insubstantiality and aimlessness of life. This he expresses subjectively in his works and has become a characteristic feature of his work.

An example of it is the various protagonists of his masterworks like War and Peace, Anne Karenina, etc. who go against the grain of society. His works are a factual assurance that life exists beyond conventionality.

Simplicity and Conformity to Nature

In Tolstoy’s works, there are no plots; rather, these can be named as the unaltered form of life. He doesn’t use manipulative techniques like dissimulation, exaggeration, distortion, etc. We rarely see any inventions in his works. He has no specific interest in language; he is an enemy of rhetoric, virtuosity, and artifice. He believed that art was nothing more than an ornament and charm.

This simplicity was the result of his religious conversion. Ivan Turgenev believed that Tolstoy wouldn’t be able to give literature anything significant. This was proved wrong when works like The Death of Ivan Ilych, What Then Must We Do?, Master and Man, etc. In contrast to Gogol’s school of nature and Western Romanticism, he has his own style, which is distinct from both.   

Epic Novel and Homeric Influences

His novels are much influenced by the epics of Homer. His novel The Cossacks can’t be read without reminding Homer on every page; the same is the case with his other works. His characters have the same traits as Homeric characters. His descriptions of places in novels are epic as Homeric works; this can be substantiated with examples of descriptions from Childhood. Their points of view resemble, the setting is pastoral and archaic.

There is a primacy of physical gestures and senses. Like Homer, his relationship with his characters in works is paradoxical. His narrative is almost inhumanly calm. But above all this, both of the authors saw men as human beings, nothing else, and this evident from their characterization.   

Form and Freedom

Tolstoy has done experiments with the form and content of his works. He follows different examples; in some cases, he follows Dickens, while in others Henry James, etc. In some places, he even goes for George Eliot’s style of characterization, where some characters have almost no impact on the plot. An example of it is from War and Peace, where the character of Yashvin is there because he is Vronsky’s friend. Though these characters have thematic functions, their contribution to action is of no significance.

He did experiments even with plots, as said earlier. In contrast to works of Henry James and George Eliot’s works, his work Anna Karenina fate is not presented as something for granted; rather, it is well crafted and decided. His plots are not mechanical as were in his predecessors’ works. His works are distinct because of emphasis and punctuation resulting from the divided action.

Narratives

This novel was written influenced by his experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus. Writing this novel, he took more than a dozen starts and rejected them, coming finally to the one that we have today. He gave the conversational opening where two characters talk about an incident, which is evidence of his non-conventional narrative. 

He has embedded in his narrative that the awareness that he came through the night as a soldier in the Caucasus. This is an experience that can only be directly communicated, and for this, he doesn’t use any indirect narrator.

The same narrative technique he uses in The Raid. In this novel, the protagonist suggests the young volunteer read a historian because the experience can’t be shared otherwise.

Poetics of Didactic Fiction

His fictional works have politics and religion as an essential element, and it defines the nature of his work. His works are didactic, and this is true in the case of some of his famous works like The Possessed, The Death of Ivan Ilych, etc. He violated the principles of fiction to make the people believe that the work was merely a fiction, and the readers should focus on the framework instead. 

There is an aesthetic experience that compels the reader to read a work of fiction. Tolstoy mixed aesthetic features with didactic ones so that the reader is able to grasp the message and experiment it in his/her life.

His works do not merely violate the conventions; there is clear defiance. These works violate the readers’ expectations by making them read the works as literature and then reject the conventions. His works are paradoxical because they both accept and deny the notion of ‘literature.’

Aspects of Sentimentalism

Family Happiness is Tolstoy’s short novel, which has received much less attention due to the sentimentalist features. In this novel, he views family life and marriage as a disillusionment. Tolstoy has links with the sentimental school, and its influences are clearly seen from his affinity to Rousseau, Sterne, and Karamzin. 

Like other sentimentalists, he merged details, there are lyrical digressions, and there is a suffusion of things with moods’ haziness.

In Family Happiness, there is the incorporation of many sentimentalist attributes. These include the country piece, emotional conflicts, sense of emotional revenge, etc. Virtue was another factor that was common in sentimentalist and Tolstoy’s works. 

He also observed a detached point of view, which was a famous feature of sentimentalist works.  The plot and character of this novel are sketched in the fashion of a sentimental novel, which has a didactic aim. In works like this, an evocation of emotions is preferred to the development of characters.    

Parallels in His Works

To make something an object of literary value, Leo Tolstoy made it dissociate from its roots and then brought it into a new association with something that he wanted to associate. Thus he created parallels that were novel as exhibiting new aspects of the old. In his works, the view of the artist is the instigator of the revolt of things. To him, a poet is the one who gives things new aspects and meanings. There is a novel use of tropes and images in his work influenced by the idea of innovating new parallels.

He creates a staircase like construction to bifurcate an object through the medium of juxtapositions and reflections. He presented things from a vantage point of view and made them strange for the reader. This parallelism can be seen in the case of death, where he juxtaposes three deaths to give a good view of the idea. In his story, The Deaths, a serf, gentlewoman, and a tree’s death are shown to elaborate on the idea of death through parallelism.  

Complex examples of parallelism can also be seen in War and Peace, where the protagonists are juxtaposed. On one side, Kutuzov and Napoleon are juxtaposed while on another side, Andrei Bolkonsky and Peri Bezukhov.

Symbolism

Kafka and Tolstoy’s use of symbols is much different though both are realist writers. In the case of Kafka, the use of symbolism seems evident as compared to Tolstoy. The difference between the two is that Tolstoy, in contrast to other novelists, has his own symbols. The factors that determine his symbols are provenance and context. In Kafka’s symbolism, there is a naturalist barrier, while Tolstoy is more inclined towards naturalism in his symbols.

Tolstoy, in his symbolism, didn’t challenge the reader’s concept of reality and interpretation. In stark difference, Kafka presents a bleak picture of reality. There is no spiritual content in his world, and he fights his war with the parable, symbols, and employment of a strategy of the dream.