the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was a
believer in the novel not as a source of
entertainment but as a tool for
psychological education and reform it
was in his eyes the supreme medium by
which we can get to know others
especially those who might from the
outside seem unappealing and thereby
expand our humanity and tolerance Leo
Tolstoy was born in 1828
at yaz nyah Pollyanna a huge family
estate a hundred miles south of Moscow
it was to be his home on and off for the
rest of his life his parents died when
he was young and he was brought up ere
relatives he flopped at University one
lecturer described him as being unable
and unwilling to learn he spent a few
years gambling and drinking and chasing
gypsy women before signing on as an
artillery officer in the Crimean War he
got married in his early 30s his wife
Sofia who came from a sophisticated high
cultured background was only 18 they had
13 children nine of whom survived
infancy it was a difficult marriage
there were huge arguments about sex and
bitterness on both sides
Leo grew a very long beard became a
fitness fanatic and spent most of his
time in his study what he did there was
to write several hugely successful books
among them war and peace Anna Karenina
and the death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy
didn’t believe in the idea of art for
art’s sake he was deeply invested in a
belief that good art should make us less
moralistic and judgmental and should be
a supplement to religion in terms of
developing our reserves of kindness and
morality this crusading moralistic side
of Tolstoy has often been ignored by
modern critics who don’t wish to dirty
art with a mission but it is in fact the
most important side of Tolstoy and none
of his efforts can properly be
appreciated without keeping it in mind
Tolstoy’s first great novel was war in
peace published in 1869 when he was 41
in it we meet Natasha Rostov a
delightful free-spirited young woman at
the start she’s engaged to Andrey a kind
and sincere man who loves her deeply but
is also rather emotionally remote and
avoidant while Andre is away traveling
in Italy Natasha meets a handsome
cynical waster call Anatole and falls
under his spell
he almost manages to seduce her and
persuades her to run away with him
though her family managed to stop her at
the very last minute
everyone is appalled and furious with
Natasha this sort of madness wrecks our
own prospects and deeply shames her
family by the world standards natasha
has failed terribly if we encountered a
news clip about such a person we might
rapidly come to the conclusion that she
lies beyond the range of normal sympathy
she had so much she thought only of
herself she got what she deserved
and yet Tolstoy his view is that if we
grasp what things are like when etosha
inside her mind we can’t and won’t
withdraw our sympathy she isn’t in truth
self indulgent frivolous or totally
lacking in devotion she’s just a
sexually an experienced young woman who
feels abandoned by her preoccupied
boyfriend she’s someone who has a deeply
impulsive and warm nature and is easily
carried away by joy and happiness
she’s also acutely worried about letting
other people down which is what leads
her into trouble with a scheming and
manipulative Anatole Tolstoy keeps us on
the Tasha side and by doing so he’s
getting us to rehearse a move he
believes is fundamental to an ethical
life if we more accurately saw the inner
lives of others they couldn’t appear to
us in the normal cold and
one-dimensional way and we would treat
them with a kindness which they truly
need and deserve no one should be
outside the circle of sympathy and
forgiveness for Tolstoy a particular
task of the novel is to help us to
understand the so called dislikable
characters one of the most initially
repellent characters in his fiction is
the husband of Anna Karenina the heroine
of his great novel of the same name the
pompous and stiff Karenina the novel a
tragedy tells the story of the beautiful
clever lively and generous hearted
married Anna whose life falls apart when
she falls in love with Vronsky a
splendid young cavalry officer Anna’s
husband can alexei Karenina is a fussy
status conscious mannered high-ranking
government official who’s often callous
towards anna and unable to answer her
emotional yearnings as anna’s affair
with Vronsky develops her husband’s main
worries that it might lead to social
gossip which could undermine his public
standing he appears to have no sincere
feelings at all about the marriage
itself he comes across as simply cold
and brutish but then Anna gives birth to
her lover’s child she is ill and in a
highly touching scene Karenina steeply
moved weeps for the infant for the
mother and forgives Anna
no you can’t forgive me susannah and yet
he suddenly felt a blissful spiritual
condition that gave him all at once a
new happiness he had never known a glad
feeling of love and forgiveness for his
enemies filled his heart he knelt down
and laying his head in the curve of
Anna’s arm he sobbed like a little child
thanks to the judicious Tolstoy we see
entirely unexpected aspects of the man
his inner life is not at all what we
would expect
judging from the outside but Tolstoy his
point is that Karenina is not really an
exceptional character he’s just the
normal mixture of bad and good it’s
highly usual for rather off-putting
people to have huge reserves of buried
tenderness to have dimensions to their
characters very different from and often
much nicer than those that they’re
forbidding appearance suggests were
invited on a comparable journey in
relation to another character in Tolstoy
fiction the hero of the death of Ivan
Ilyich published in 1886 at the start of
the novel we meet even a high court
judge of the pinnacle of society who
appears selfish vain and cynical but one
day while helping hang some curtains a
van falls from a ladder and becomes
aware of an inner pain which is the
first sign of a disease which is soon
diagnosed as fatal he will have just a
few months left to live as his health
declines even spent a lot of time
sitting on the sofa at home his family
aware at just how inconvenient his death
will be to their social and financial
standing begin to resent him in his
illness he’s short and ill-tempered back
and yet inside if an is going through a
range of epiphanies he looks back over
his life and atones for its shallowness
he becomes newly sensitive to nature and
to the ordinary kindness of his
manservant
a humble uneducated man of peasant stock
he grows furious at the stupid way in
which everyone avoids paying attention
to the one really crucial fact about
life that we all die he realizes that
our mortality should be constantly
before our minds and should inspire
continual kindness and sympathy as he
dies Tolstoy imagines a van finally
feeling pity and forgiveness for all
those around him as is typical in his
writing
Tolstoy recounts in detail the vast
philosophical and psychological dramas
going on inside his hero’s head all that
those around him the doctors and his
family get to see is a
and man who spends a lot of time with
his face to the wall and yet we can see
a visionary a prophet and a man of
outstanding moral courage and generosity
in writing about a van
Tolstoy wanted us to see his life as a
representative of all human potential if
only we could wake up to it before it’s
too late when he was about 70 Tolstoy
pulled together his thinking about being
a writer in a long essay what is art
it’s one of his most important books in
it Tolstoy proposes that art has a great
mission through great art he tells us
lower feelings less kind and less needed
for the good of humanity are forced out
and replaced by kinder feelings which
better serve us individually and
collectively this is the purpose of art
as a supremely skilled and seductive
writer Tolstoy knew that novels need to
be entertaining or we simply were bother
to read them but he was also convinced
that they have to aspire to be something
else as well
he supports for our own stumbling paths
to maturity and kindness and they can do
this because they’re able to get into a
place we need but rarely have access to
the inner lives of other people in what
is art Tolstoy was mostly writing about
the works of other authors but it’s
really his own achievement that he is
indirectly and modestly summing up great
writers shouldn’t ever just be helping
their readers past the time their
writing must be a form of therapy an
attempt to educators towards emotional
health
an ethical good sense as they aged the
tensions between Leo and his wife Sofia
grew he complained that they had totally
opposite ideas of the meaning of
existence yet he insisted that even as
Sofia grew more and more irritable
despotic and uncontrollable he continued
to love her
though he admitted that he had given up
trying to express his feelings there is
no greater tragedy than the tragedy of
the marital bed he wrote finally when he
was past 80 Tolstoy couldn’t take it
anymore
and deserted his wife and family he ran
away in the middle of a freezing
November night caught pneumonia and died
at a nearby railway station where he was
waiting for a train Tolstoy’s funeral
was a major public occasion thousands
showed up from across Russia in the
world this was fitting for his central
proposal has enormous social
implications
Tolstoy realized that our picture of
what other people are like is a great
driving force of relationships economic
in politics he held up the tantalizing
idea that art could be the major vehicle
for getting more accurate and often much
kinder ideas about what’s going on in
the minds and lives of other people his
body was taken back to his house and
buried in the garden under some trees where he liked to play as a child
believer in the novel not as a source of
entertainment but as a tool for
psychological education and reform it
was in his eyes the supreme medium by
which we can get to know others
especially those who might from the
outside seem unappealing and thereby
expand our humanity and tolerance Leo
Tolstoy was born in 1828
at yaz nyah Pollyanna a huge family
estate a hundred miles south of Moscow
it was to be his home on and off for the
rest of his life his parents died when
he was young and he was brought up ere
relatives he flopped at University one
lecturer described him as being unable
and unwilling to learn he spent a few
years gambling and drinking and chasing
gypsy women before signing on as an
artillery officer in the Crimean War he
got married in his early 30s his wife
Sofia who came from a sophisticated high
cultured background was only 18 they had
13 children nine of whom survived
infancy it was a difficult marriage
there were huge arguments about sex and
bitterness on both sides
Leo grew a very long beard became a
fitness fanatic and spent most of his
time in his study what he did there was
to write several hugely successful books
among them war and peace Anna Karenina
and the death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy
didn’t believe in the idea of art for
art’s sake he was deeply invested in a
belief that good art should make us less
moralistic and judgmental and should be
a supplement to religion in terms of
developing our reserves of kindness and
morality this crusading moralistic side
of Tolstoy has often been ignored by
modern critics who don’t wish to dirty
art with a mission but it is in fact the
most important side of Tolstoy and none
of his efforts can properly be
appreciated without keeping it in mind
Tolstoy’s first great novel was war in
peace published in 1869 when he was 41
in it we meet Natasha Rostov a
delightful free-spirited young woman at
the start she’s engaged to Andrey a kind
and sincere man who loves her deeply but
is also rather emotionally remote and
avoidant while Andre is away traveling
in Italy Natasha meets a handsome
cynical waster call Anatole and falls
under his spell
he almost manages to seduce her and
persuades her to run away with him
though her family managed to stop her at
the very last minute
everyone is appalled and furious with
Natasha this sort of madness wrecks our
own prospects and deeply shames her
family by the world standards natasha
has failed terribly if we encountered a
news clip about such a person we might
rapidly come to the conclusion that she
lies beyond the range of normal sympathy
she had so much she thought only of
herself she got what she deserved
and yet Tolstoy his view is that if we
grasp what things are like when etosha
inside her mind we can’t and won’t
withdraw our sympathy she isn’t in truth
self indulgent frivolous or totally
lacking in devotion she’s just a
sexually an experienced young woman who
feels abandoned by her preoccupied
boyfriend she’s someone who has a deeply
impulsive and warm nature and is easily
carried away by joy and happiness
she’s also acutely worried about letting
other people down which is what leads
her into trouble with a scheming and
manipulative Anatole Tolstoy keeps us on
the Tasha side and by doing so he’s
getting us to rehearse a move he
believes is fundamental to an ethical
life if we more accurately saw the inner
lives of others they couldn’t appear to
us in the normal cold and
one-dimensional way and we would treat
them with a kindness which they truly
need and deserve no one should be
outside the circle of sympathy and
forgiveness for Tolstoy a particular
task of the novel is to help us to
understand the so called dislikable
characters one of the most initially
repellent characters in his fiction is
the husband of Anna Karenina the heroine
of his great novel of the same name the
pompous and stiff Karenina the novel a
tragedy tells the story of the beautiful
clever lively and generous hearted
married Anna whose life falls apart when
she falls in love with Vronsky a
splendid young cavalry officer Anna’s
husband can alexei Karenina is a fussy
status conscious mannered high-ranking
government official who’s often callous
towards anna and unable to answer her
emotional yearnings as anna’s affair
with Vronsky develops her husband’s main
worries that it might lead to social
gossip which could undermine his public
standing he appears to have no sincere
feelings at all about the marriage
itself he comes across as simply cold
and brutish but then Anna gives birth to
her lover’s child she is ill and in a
highly touching scene Karenina steeply
moved weeps for the infant for the
mother and forgives Anna
no you can’t forgive me susannah and yet
he suddenly felt a blissful spiritual
condition that gave him all at once a
new happiness he had never known a glad
feeling of love and forgiveness for his
enemies filled his heart he knelt down
and laying his head in the curve of
Anna’s arm he sobbed like a little child
thanks to the judicious Tolstoy we see
entirely unexpected aspects of the man
his inner life is not at all what we
would expect
judging from the outside but Tolstoy his
point is that Karenina is not really an
exceptional character he’s just the
normal mixture of bad and good it’s
highly usual for rather off-putting
people to have huge reserves of buried
tenderness to have dimensions to their
characters very different from and often
much nicer than those that they’re
forbidding appearance suggests were
invited on a comparable journey in
relation to another character in Tolstoy
fiction the hero of the death of Ivan
Ilyich published in 1886 at the start of
the novel we meet even a high court
judge of the pinnacle of society who
appears selfish vain and cynical but one
day while helping hang some curtains a
van falls from a ladder and becomes
aware of an inner pain which is the
first sign of a disease which is soon
diagnosed as fatal he will have just a
few months left to live as his health
declines even spent a lot of time
sitting on the sofa at home his family
aware at just how inconvenient his death
will be to their social and financial
standing begin to resent him in his
illness he’s short and ill-tempered back
and yet inside if an is going through a
range of epiphanies he looks back over
his life and atones for its shallowness
he becomes newly sensitive to nature and
to the ordinary kindness of his
manservant
a humble uneducated man of peasant stock
he grows furious at the stupid way in
which everyone avoids paying attention
to the one really crucial fact about
life that we all die he realizes that
our mortality should be constantly
before our minds and should inspire
continual kindness and sympathy as he
dies Tolstoy imagines a van finally
feeling pity and forgiveness for all
those around him as is typical in his
writing
Tolstoy recounts in detail the vast
philosophical and psychological dramas
going on inside his hero’s head all that
those around him the doctors and his
family get to see is a
and man who spends a lot of time with
his face to the wall and yet we can see
a visionary a prophet and a man of
outstanding moral courage and generosity
in writing about a van
Tolstoy wanted us to see his life as a
representative of all human potential if
only we could wake up to it before it’s
too late when he was about 70 Tolstoy
pulled together his thinking about being
a writer in a long essay what is art
it’s one of his most important books in
it Tolstoy proposes that art has a great
mission through great art he tells us
lower feelings less kind and less needed
for the good of humanity are forced out
and replaced by kinder feelings which
better serve us individually and
collectively this is the purpose of art
as a supremely skilled and seductive
writer Tolstoy knew that novels need to
be entertaining or we simply were bother
to read them but he was also convinced
that they have to aspire to be something
else as well
he supports for our own stumbling paths
to maturity and kindness and they can do
this because they’re able to get into a
place we need but rarely have access to
the inner lives of other people in what
is art Tolstoy was mostly writing about
the works of other authors but it’s
really his own achievement that he is
indirectly and modestly summing up great
writers shouldn’t ever just be helping
their readers past the time their
writing must be a form of therapy an
attempt to educators towards emotional
health
an ethical good sense as they aged the
tensions between Leo and his wife Sofia
grew he complained that they had totally
opposite ideas of the meaning of
existence yet he insisted that even as
Sofia grew more and more irritable
despotic and uncontrollable he continued
to love her
though he admitted that he had given up
trying to express his feelings there is
no greater tragedy than the tragedy of
the marital bed he wrote finally when he
was past 80 Tolstoy couldn’t take it
anymore
and deserted his wife and family he ran
away in the middle of a freezing
November night caught pneumonia and died
at a nearby railway station where he was
waiting for a train Tolstoy’s funeral
was a major public occasion thousands
showed up from across Russia in the
world this was fitting for his central
proposal has enormous social
implications
Tolstoy realized that our picture of
what other people are like is a great
driving force of relationships economic
in politics he held up the tantalizing
idea that art could be the major vehicle
for getting more accurate and often much
kinder ideas about what’s going on in
the minds and lives of other people his
body was taken back to his house and
buried in the garden under some trees where he liked to play as a child
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