Lecture 13. Realism and critical realism

Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Born the son of Count Nikolai on their family estate in the south of Moscow, Count Leo (Lev) Tolstoy lost both his parents before he was ten. He studied Oriental languages at the University of Kazan but left it without taking a degree. He once ran his family estate and tried to improve the condition of his peasants. In 1851 he went to the Caucasus and enlisted in the army. In 1854 he participated in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Later, he made three trips to Germany, England, Italy, and Switzerland. In 1862 he married Sophya Behrs. In 1901 he was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church for his own spiritual transformation, which led him to reject the divinity of Jesus, to denounce the Church, to discard all dogma and ritual, and to stress merely the moral and ethical side of Christianity. During his last few years, he was estranged from his wife and all of his children except his youngest daughter. In November 1910, he died at Astapovo when he was on his way to a monastery.
Tolstoy wrote novels, short stories, plays, polemical tracts, theological treatises and other types of work in addition to his autobiographical trilogy (Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth). He is remembered, however, mainly as a novelist and a moral philosopher. His writings often smack of his love-for-all-mankind didacticism, as they express his belief in passive resistance to evil and in living simple, primitive life of physical labor as well as his condemnation of capitalism, private property, and even civilization. Today, he and Dostoevsky are often put side by side, regarded as the two most influential writers that have made the Russian realistic novel as remarkable as classical Greek tragedy and Elizabethan drama. His best-known works are War and Peace and Anna Karenina. An often-read story of his is The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Tolstoy’ s first great novel, War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1864-1869), is a very long novel with the time of Napoleon’ s invasion into Russia as its background and with over 500 characters rendered therein to represent every social level (from the emperor to the peasant). With chapters depicting battles and dealing with the author’ s philosophy of history which alternate with chapters describing personal lives, this novel is indeed a long story of war and peace, in which individual stories of several main characters, especially those of Natasha, Prince Andrey and Pierre, are woven into the historical event. The stories are all growth stories in the developing history of the world as a whole. The characters grow from youthful ignorance towards mature understanding. While Natasha grows from a girl excited at her first ball—through a lady loved, betrothed, and seduced—to a loving wife and mother, Prince Andrey grows to know the meaning of life through losing Natasha at first for going to war and losing his own life at last for being gravely wounded at a battle; Pierre grows to find enjoyable peace in living a simple life as Natasha’ s husband with simple wisdom learned from a peasant through the turbulent currents of war during which he once attempts to assassinate Napoleon and is once captured in trying to rescue a Russian woman from being molested by French soldiers.