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Leo Tolstoy: Prophet, Novelist, and Conscience of Russia
By CountryReports.org
INTRODUCTION
Leo Tolstoy occupies a singular position in world literature: widely regarded as the greatest novelist who ever lived, he is also one of the few major writers whose moral and spiritual influence rivals his literary achievement. He spent roughly the first half of his adult life creating War and Peace and Anna Karenina — the two works that together represent the highest sustained achievement of the realistic novel — and the second half repudiating literature, wealth, and social privilege in pursuit of a moral and religious vision that would shake the Russian Orthodox Church, inspire Mahatma Gandhi, and shape the course of twentieth-century nonviolent resistance.
The contradiction between the artist and the moralist, the aristocrat and the peasant-lover, the passionate sensualist and the ascetic reformer — these tensions were not resolved over the course of Tolstoy's long life but intensified into a drama that played out in public, in private diaries, and in the pages of his later works with an honesty and a self-laceration that few writers have equaled. He lived to eighty-two, producing a body of work that spans fiction, philosophy, theology, pedagogy, political theory, and spiritual autobiography. He died, in 1910, fleeing his own home at the age of eighty-two — an old man, still driven by the imperatives of conscience that had tormented him since youth.
His biography is the biography of a consciousness: a mind of extraordinary power, turned upon itself and upon the world with remorseless attention, finding in every experience the material for art and moral interrogation. He was born into the Russian aristocracy at a moment when that class was beginning its slow dissolution; he lived through the emancipation of the serfs, the Crimean War, the reforms of Alexander II, the revolutionary movements of the late nineteenth century, and the first stirrings of the upheaval that would eventually destroy the world he had known. He engaged with all of these events — in his art, in his journalism, in his correspondence with Tsar Alexander III and later Nicholas II, and in the communities of disciples who gathered around him at Yasnaya Polyana — with a directness and a moral urgency that made him simultaneously one of the most celebrated and most controversial men in Russia.
Tolstoy's greatness lies not in any single quality but in an incomparable combination of gifts: the sensory acuity that registers experience in all its physical density; the psychological penetration that follows the movements of consciousness with microscopic precision; the epic breadth of vision that can hold individual lives and historical processes in simultaneous focus; and the moral seriousness that refuses to accept the comfortable compromises through which most people organize their inner lives. These gifts, deployed in the service of novels that encompass the full breadth of human experience, produced works that have no equal in the literature of any language.