Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, famous to the world first of all for his novels “War & Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, was not satisfied only with literary work. He also became a moral evangelist, a prophet of a new religious thought. He sought to found a practical religion that promised “Heaven on Earth!” He had disciples all over the world. Tolstoy’s spiritual quest lasted his entire life. He was seeking Truth and was willing to sacrifice himself for this Truth.

     Childhood
     Leo Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828 in the estate Yasnaya Polana, which is located near Tula, not far from Moscow. He was the fourth of five children in the large aristocratic family of the Count Nicholas Tolstoy. The mother of Leo Tolstoy, Princess Mary, belonged to a very rich family. The parents of Leo Tolstoy had an unhappy marriage. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was 2 years old and his father died 7 years after his mother.
     The orphaned children were brought up on the family estate by relatives. At Yasnaya Polana life was static and deeply archaic. Like all noble children they were taught at home. Foreign teachers, mostly French and German played the main role in Tolstoy’s education. Everyday life consisted of guests, entertainment, hunting and church. This natural and also spiritual lifestyle would form the personality of Leo Tolstoy.

     Adventures of a Dandy
     In 1841, the Tolstoy children were taken to Kazan, to the house of their rich aunt. In Kazan, Leo Tolstoy started to prepare for entrance exams to the University of Kazan, which was one of the best scientific and educational centers of the time. His first attempt to enter the University was unsuccessful. He was accepted in 1844, but studying there seemed to be too much work for him. He was disappointed in his initial choice of specialization. At first, he chose the Faculty of Eastern Languages, but soon gave it up and started to study law. Russia was on the eve of great reforms and the abolishment of serfdom was widely discussed, that’s why young Tolstoy preferred the Faculty of Law. However, he rarely attended lectures, instead he attended ball parties. Leo Tolstoy and his brothers belonged to the noblest circles of Kazan. Tolstoy tried his best to look like a brilliant dandy but he failed. He was not very attractive, and he had bad manners as well. With his rough face and big palms he looked like a bear. Moreover, he was difficult to communicate with and was intolerant to differing opinions.
     Passions woke up early in his nature and he followed them with that very spontaneity which characterized all his undertakings. He pursued every pretty girl he saw. Nothing could stop him from satisfying his desires. Legends about Tolstoy’s sensuality reveal the reality, his ardor was unlimited.
     Tolstoy couldn’t prevent moral failures but then regretted them terribly. He understood well the solitude, alienation and pain that come with genius and suffered from the contradictions and contrasts in his soul. He endured a constant loneliness, but also could take little solace from the company of others. In order to better understand himself, he started to write a diary which became a perfect example of self-examination. The ruthless self recrimination is easily evident from his diary: “I’m ugly, clumsy, dirty, barely educated enough for high society. I’m irritable, boring to others, immodest, intolerant and shy like a child, I’m almost an ignoramus, what I know – I’ve learned haphazardly. Intemperate, irresolute, inconstant, foolishly vainglorious and ardent like all weak-willed people. I’m not brave and I’m lazy.”
     It was through trying to understand himself that he discovered the path to understanding other people and the world. He started to read authors who were consistent with his inner search. Russo became his idol. Tolstoy was impressed by the man who dared to throw down the gauntlet to all of society and the social system. Like Russo, Tolstoy felt the falsehoods both of the social system and of the state institutions and dreamt of a life in unity with nature.
     Denying state institutions included denying traditional education. In 1847 Tolstoy gave up the University of Kazan and went back to his family estate at Yasnaya Polana dreaming about a new, useful, life without temptations. He was just 18 when he returned. He planned a program of self-education and selfperfection which included: laws, mathematics, agriculture, applied medicine, foreign languages, history, geography, music and painting. Moreover, he decided to improve conditions for his serfs. However most of his undertakings at this time failed: the breach between Lords and Serfs was so deep that one young man couldn’t affect it. Deeply disappointed, he left for Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1848 and instead devoted himself to revelry. Soon he had a lot of debts. He then underwent a deep spiritual crisis seeing little sense in his life. In 1851 he decided to try literature.

     Beginning of Literary Career
     In 1851 Tolstoy wrote his first story, “Childhood”, it was an immediate success. Then, following the example of his brother he left for the Caucasus to start a military career. For young Russian noblemen going to war often symbolized romantic adventures. The conditions were awful but Tolstoy was inspired with the primitive life. After the Caucasus, he participated in the Crimean war which was then at its zenith.
     He continued his literary work in the Crimea. At that time he wrote several small stories about the realities of war. He was trying to find the ideal of a “natural life” like Russo. Tolstoy believed that ordinary peasants had a unity with the land and a relationship with the earth that much of the rest of the society had been cut off from.
     The first literary experiments brought glory to young Leo Tolstoy and he decided to devote his life to literature. In 1855, he writes in his diary: “My career is literature. Write and write! From tomorrow I will work all my life and give up everything: rules, religion – everything”. But several days later he wrote that he couldn’t be limited by literature. “The talk about faith and the divine inspired me with an idea of founding a new religion which would correspond to the level of progress of humanity. A religion of Christ but free from mysteries and superstitions, practical religion not promising future happiness but creating heaven on earth...” The seeds of his future philosophy can be traced to this line from his diary. The foundation of the new religion combined his ideas about glory and the virtue. He couldn’t be satisfied only with art; he was to become a prophet.
     In 1855 Tolstoy came to St. Petersburg. This was a period of great public activity in Russia when great reforms were being prepared. Russian intellectuals discussed ways of changing their country. Thinkers of the era believed that the path of Russia couldn’t be a copy of Europe. Early novels by Tolstoy played a role in this discussion.
     The first period of his literary career marks the years 1851-1863. His most famous novels written at that time are “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”, “Kazaks”, “Stories about Sevastopol”. Tolstoy found inspiration in the images of ordinary peasants and soldiers, which to a certain extent resembles Russo’s ideal of the “natural person”. He contemplated the fate of Russia and stressed the priority of truth and morality over material progress.
     In 1856, he was again at his estate, again with enormous plans. He had a desire to give freedom to his serfs ahead of the coming Tsars decree. At the same time he took more “care” of all of his attractive female serfs and seriously thought about the idea of marrying the peasant Valeria, but he wasn’t able to.
     In 1857, Tolstoy went to Western Europe. Russian intellectuals and artists often traveled to Europe, sometimes to stay for years. Contacts with the West were close and deep. Tolstoy started his acquaintance with Europe in Paris where he expressed the desire to see an execution by guillotine. That was a shattering experience. He concluded: “It is true that the state is an organization not only for exploitation, but also for depraving citizens”. After Paris, Tolstoy visited picturesque places in Switzerland and then left for Germany.

     Female Relationships
     After traveling, Tolstoy returned to his family estate at Yasnaya Polana. In 1869 he opened a school for peasant children there. The project demanded all his time. He continued his love affair with Valeria but again was not satisfied. She gave birth to his son, Timothy. Tolstoy never officially admitted the boy was his son. Timothy was brought up as a peasant. Tolstoy was also said to have many other relationships with peasant women and legend has it, that there were many children at Yasnaya Polana resembling the Count Leo Tolstoy. Contemplating the problems of family and marriage Tolstoy wrote the novel “Family Happiness”.
     Tolstoy experienced a great spiritual shock when his beloved brother died. He would thereafter live with a mysterious fear of death. His inner suffering was expressed in the story “Three Deaths”.
     Seeking fresh impressions, Tolstoy returned to Europe in 1861. He visited Italy, Germany and Britain. On coming back, he continued his work at the school. Though it wasn’t obvious, his personality was on the eve of great changes.

     Marriage and Creativity
     In 1862 Tolstoy got married. He was already 34 at that time. His wife Sophy was 18. She was feminine, tender and naive. She was in love with Tolstoy and unprepared for the difficulties of family life. At the beginning it was light and poetic. Tolstoy was in love and his feelings were so excited that he couldn’t pronounce the marriage proposal. Instead, he wrote his declaration of love on the table while talking with his beloved. In his diary he confessed: “I am in love, I even didn’t believe that such a love is possible”.
     Their relationship wasn’t tranquil. Following his ethics, Tolstoy gave his young wife the diary where all the sins of his youth were described in detail. She was shocked. She was also shocked with a too spontaneous expression of Tolstoy’s passion on their way from Moscow to Yasnaya Polana. When they finally came to Tolstoy’s estate those peasant girls who had been his lovers still lived and worked there. Sophy could see many former lovers of her husband every day (after everything which she found in Tolstoy’s diary!). Sophy had to devote herself to her husband and the household. She suffered from the wild mood swings of her husband. She described it in her diary soon after their marriage, “Husband is ill, he doesn’t love me. It is awful. Where is my great happiness?”
     Sophy was a clever woman with a tender soul. She came to accept Tolstoy with all the contrasts of his character. She became his devoted helper and rewrote his compositions with great patience, sometimes as many as seven or eight times. This let Tolstoy fully concentrate on his literary work. She also was the mother to their thirteen children, five of which died in early childhood. The first fifteen years of their family life were on the whole happy years.
     Tolstoy reached the height of his artistic creativity during those years. In 1869 he finished his epic “War and Peace”. It had taken six years to write. The number of story lines, characters and philosophical components in the work is gigantic. Tolstoy brought to the page the entire panorama of Russian life and social classes in all their beauty and difficulty against the historical background of the war with Napoleon. To try to understand it, you must understand that the word “peace” in Russian also means world, universe and community, so this work was about the entirety of human struggle and all of human good. It also represents Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and the interactions of private destinies with the fates of nations.
     Besides literary work, Tolstoy continued his social activity at his estate. His wife helped him in everything. Tolstoy still ran his school for peasant children and even wrote an ABC-book for the pupils.
     The family atmosphere probably inspired Tolstoy for the creation of the novel-chronicle “Anna Karenina.” In this novel, Tolstoy wrote his most autobiographical character, Levin. Levin’s philosophical and spiritual struggles are representative of Tolstoy’s spiritual quest. The ideas that Levin develops are the Tolstoy doctrine in literary rather than philosophical form. Levin is the first disciple of Tolstoy’s faith.
     Tolstoy’s religious search terrified his wife because the ideas of her husband contradicted with Church teachings. She wrote about it: “Leo is working... but he is writing strange religious thoughts, contemplating up to a headache and reading, just in order to show that the church contradicts the Gospel. I hope he finishes it soon and it will go away like an illness”.

     Spiritual Search
     His spiritual search was strengthened by a growing fear of death. He had an intense panic attack one night so strong that he barely avoided madness. “My life stopped… I couldn’t see any rational meaning in the whole of life” – he wrote in his “Confession” which was published in 1879.
     Tolstoy was in spiritual crisis because he didn’t see any meaning in life. The puritan, moralist was fighting against the artist inside him. He was almost ready to deny even his own art as a useless, senseless and depraving activity.

     Read the conclusion of Tolstoy’s struggles and accomplishments in the next issue of Neva News.