Picos Gemeos

Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I became curious about Tolstoy’s life after reading a biography on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of anarchy, and discovering that he’d met Tolstoy, who was also an anarchist and a vegetarian. Like most people, I used to think of Tolstoy as a sort of a bearded Jane Austen – a writer of grand love stories. But he was more than that and it’s partly the USSR’s fault (according to this biography) that we don’t know this: Tolstoy was in fact highly subversive in his lifetime because of his views on religion and war, protected from government persecution because of his noble background and popularity, but also a danger to communism (it’s generally agreed he’d have faced a firing line if he’d still been alive after the October Revolution of 1917.)

There were three phases to Tolstoy’s life. The first phase, his youth, was marked by growing up in his family’s estate Yasnaya Polyana (a place so important to him that his family went to great lengths to preserve it after his death), sowing his wild oats as a young man (his first attempt at writing came while recuperating in a clinic for venereal diseases), then experiencing the Crimean war and becoming the first modern war correspondent by publishing impactful accounts of it.

The second phase began with his marriage to Sophia Behrs, their family life in Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow, and the fame that came with the publishing of masterpieces like “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”. The third phase started with his turn away from literary fame to dedicate himself to creating educational material for Russia’s serfs (he thought this was what he’d be remembered for), renouncing Russian Orthodoxy for a form of grassroots Christianity based on his studies of the scriptures (which went on to become a social movement known as Tolstoyanism), and finally his renunciation of all material wealth, in keeping with his anarchist and religious views.

There is so much that could be said about Tolstoy’s life – it was jam-packed with genius, egoism, soul searching and controversy. This biography made me want to read more about his life and read everything he has published, especially the more subversive works from his later years. His wife Sophia should be rightfully credited for all the editing work she did throughout their marriage, but there’s no doubt that Tolstoy was a towering figure and perhaps the greatest writer the world has ever seen. This biography makes the claim that the Russian Revolution couldn’t have happened without his taking down of the Romanov Dinasty and Orthodox Church (he was the first person in Russia to have a civil burial after being excommunicated by the Church) but his philosophy also deeply affected the 25-year-old Gandhi, with its doctrine that revolution could happen through non-violence. For better or for worse, Tolstoy changed millions of lives.

My favourite moment in the biography, however, is from Tolstoy’s childhood. One of his favourite things was to get into bed with his grandmother at night, in a room only lit with a few candles, and listen to stories told by a blind serf. I’d like to think it was in these nights, just before falling asleep, that Tolstoy fell in love with storytelling.

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