Reading Notes W11: Leo Tolstoy, Part A

Tolstoy (735-778)

  • Leo Tolstoy was many things, like: a gambler, womanizer, aristocrat of the highest rank, vegetarian, pacifist, anarchist, and a passionate advocate for the Russian peasantry (735)
  • He was world-famous for his wisdom on the subject of marriage
  • But, suffered through a terrible marriage himself
  • He became widely known as a moral and religious sage, but he was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church (735)
  • He produced some of the century's best fiction
  • Born in 1828, Tolstoy was the 4th out of 5 children
  • His parents belonged to the highest class of Russian society
  • Tolstoy never took advantage of his high birth to pursue a grand career as a diplomat or courtier
  • His mother died when he was 2 and his father died when he was 9 so he spent his youth years very isolated
  • He was an orphan that moved from one household to another
  • He was close to his siblings and they all imagined a perfect society based on a universal love
  • At 14, Tolstoy started to visit brothels
  • After his first experience, he claimed to have stood next to the bed and wept (736)
  • He had a diary and wrote in it daily which helped developed his skills as a writer
  • Tolstoy went to the provincial university at Kazan to study Arabic, Turko-Tartar, French, and German
  • He later then switched to law, a course of study only open only to the highest-ranking aristocrats (736)
  • But he dropped law and in 1847 he inherited the family estate, a large sum of money, and the ownership of over three hundred serfs (736)
  • Because of this, he had time to travel to places and gamble night after night
  • At 34, he was now a famous writer and married Sofya Andreyevna Bers, an 18 year old upper class
  • After he proposed to her, he let her read his diary which was full of sexual activities with prostitutes, gypsies, and serfs and she forgave him
  • Over their long marriage, Sofya had 13 children, made 4 hand-written copies of the 1,500 page War and Peace, and did her best to protect her husband's literary property (736)
  • Tolstoy's great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karentina, told the sweeping realiest stpries of the 19th century Russian life
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich was a story about an average man of the middle class who faces the unbearable fact that he is soon going to die (739)
  • Tolstoy experiments with perspective, choosing to begin the story at its endpoint, as the news of Ivan Ilyvich's death comes to his acquaintances 

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