Leo Tolstoy biography
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Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy biography
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Famous : Writer, Literary figure
Country: Russia
Category: Writers
Zodiac sign: Maid
Date of birth: September 9, 1828.
Date of death: November 20, 1910. (82 years old)
Biography added: April 1, 2014.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a great Russian writer.
Childhood and adolescence.
Sevastopol stories.
He was born on August 26 (September 9), 1828 in the Yasnaya Polyana estate of the Tula province, (now the estate museum in the Tula region) in one of the most notable Russian noble families.
The distant ancestor of Leo Nikolaevich, Peter Alekseevich Tolstoy — an associate of Peter the Great, was a cruel, treacherous and power hungry nobleman, a man of great statesmanship and great willpower.
For his services to the tsar, he was granted the title of count.
On his mother's side, Lev Nikolaevich belonged to the ancient family of the Volkonsky princes.
Belonging to the aristocracy throughout his life largely determined Tolstoy's behavior and thoughts.
In his youth and in his mature years, he thought a lot about the special vocation of the old Russian nobility, which preserves the ideals of naturalness, personal honor, independence and freedom.
In his declining years, he began to be burdened by his privileged position and everyday life, unlike the life of the working, ordinary people.
Aphorisms are perhaps the best form for presenting philosophical judgments.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
The first years of Tolstoy's life were spent in the estate of his parents Yasnaya Polyana near the city of Tula.
Very early, at the age of one and a half years, he lost his mother Maria Nikolaevna, an emotional and determined woman.
Tolstoy knew many family stories about his mother.
The image of her was fanned for him with the brightest feelings.
His father, Nikolai Ilyich, a retired colonel, was friends with the Decembrists Islenyev and Koloshin.
He was distinguished by pride and independence in relations with representatives of the authorities.
For the Fat child, the father was the embodiment of beauty, strength, passionate, gambling love for the joys of life.
From him he inherited a passion for dog hunting, the beauty and excitement of which Tolstoy expressed many years later on the pages of the novel War and Peace in the description of the wolf baiting by the hounds of the old Count Rostov.
Tolstoy also had warm and touching memories of his childhood with his older brother Nikolenka.
Nikolenka taught little Levushka unusual games, told him and other brothers stories about universal human happiness.
In Tolstoy's first novel Childhood, its hero Nikolenka Irtenyev, who is in many ways biographically and mentally close to the author, speaks about the early years of his life: "Happy, happy, irrevocable time of childhood!
How not to love, not to cherish memories of her?
These memories refresh, elevate my soul and serve as a source of the best pleasures for me."
The author of the story could also say these words about his childhood.
Immortality, of course incomplete, is undoubtedly realized in posterity.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
In 1837, Tolstoy's family moved from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow.
A serene, joyful childhood has ended.
In the summer of this year, the father unexpectedly dies, their aunt, the father's sister Alexandra Ilyinichna Osten Saken becomes the guardian of the orphaned children.
Four years later, she died.
The Tolstoys moved to Kazan, where another aunt, Pelageya Ilyinichna Yushkovskaya, lived.
Tolstoy's youth was spent in Kazan.
Here, in 1844, he entered the Faculty of Philosophy of the University.
He studied unsystematically, missed lectures and as a result was not allowed to take transfer exams.
Having not received admission to the history exam, in 1845 he transferred to another faculty — law.
But even at this faculty they taught history, the lessons of which seemed boring and unpleasant to him.
He starts skipping history lectures again.
He indulged in secular amusements and carousals with all passion.
At that time, he treated people not secular, not aristocrats with contempt.
Brother Sergei called him a "trifling fellow".
But it was not only secular amusements that attracted Tolstoy.
He thought a lot about the fate of mankind, about the place of sciences in life.
His dislike of history is not evidence of his limitations.
Once a Tolstoy student remarked in a conversation with an interlocutor: "History... is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, interspersed with a mass of unnecessary numbers and proper names...".
In the sciences, the young Tolstoy was looking primarily for practical meaning.
He was not interested in knowledge that could not be applied in everyday life.
This is exactly how "useless" history seems to him.
Such a view of science in general is characteristic of many people of the new era, whose worldview was formed in the 1840s.
The sharpness and independence of Tolstoy's judgments remained throughout his life.
And the denial of traditional historical science was manifested with a new force in the 1860s in the novel War and Peace.
The benefit of people in life.
And life is about work.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
On April 12, 1847, Tolstoy, disappointed in his university education, filed a petition for expulsion from the university.
He went to Yasnaya Polyana, hoping to try himself in a new field — to improve the life of his serfs.
The peasants did not understand the master, refused his advice and help.
For the first time, Tolstoy acutely felt the huge, insurmountable gap separating him — the landowner, the master — and the common people.
Social and cultural barriers between the educated class and the people have become one of the constant themes of Tolstoy's fiction and articles.
He described his first unsuccessful experience of managing a few years later in the story The Morning of the Landowner (1856), the hero of which Nekhludoff is endowed with the features of Tolstoy himself.
nie.
Tolstoy focuses on the experience of psychological analysis of sentimentalist writers of the 18th century.
L. Stern and J.-J.Rousseau, learns the techniques of revealing experiences in the novel by M. Y. Lermontov, the Hero of our time.
In March 1851, Tolstoy wrote The History of Yesterday — an excerpt in which he describes his feelings in detail.
This is no longer just a diary entry, but a work of art.
Charity is only charity when it is a sacrifice.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
In April 1851, he went to the Caucasus, where there was a war between Russian troops and Chechens.
In January 1852, he entered military service in the artillery.
Participates in battles and works on the story Childhood.
Childhood was published under the title The Story of my childhood (this title belonged to Nekrasov) in the 9th issue of the magazine "Sovremennik" for 1852 and brought Tolstoy great success and fame as one of the most talented Russian writers.
Two years later, also in the 9th issue of Sovremennik, a continuation appears — the novella Adolescence, and in the 1st issue for 1857, the novella Youth was published, which completed the story about Nikolai Irtenev — the hero of Childhood and Adolescence.
The originality of Childhood and Adolescence was subtly noticed by the writer and critic N. Chernyshevsky in the article Childhood and adolescence.
Military stories gr.
Tolstoy (1856).
He called the distinctive features of Tolstoy's talent "a deep knowledge of the secret movements of psychic life and the direct purity of moral feeling."
Tolstoy's Three stories are not a consistent story of the upbringing and growing up of the main character and narrator, Nikolenka Irtenev.
This is a description of a number of episodes of his life — children's games, the first hunt and the first love for Sonechka Valakhina, the death of his mother, relationships with friends, balls and studies.
What seems petty to others, unworthy of attention, and what for others are the actual events of Nikolenka's life, occupy an equal place in the consciousness of the child's hero himself.
Resentment against the teacher Karl Ivanovich, who killed a fly over Nikolenka's head with a firecracker and woke him up, is experienced by the hero no less acutely than the first love or separation from relatives.
Tolstoy describes in detail the feelings of the child.
The depiction of feelings in Childhood, Adolescence and Youth resembles the analysis of one's own experiences in Tolstoy's diaries.
The principles of depicting the inner world of the characters outlined in the diaries and embodied in these three stories passed into the novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina and many other later works of Tolstoy.
The theme of simplicity and naturalness as the highest value of life and the "dispute" with the "ceremonial", beautiful image of the war is expressed in the essays Sevastopol in December (1855), Sevastopol in May (1855) and Sevastopol in August 1855 (1856).
The essays describe the episodes of the heroic defense of Sevastopol from the Anglo French troops in 1855.
Tolstoy himself participated in the defense of Sevastopol and spent many days and nights in the most dangerous place — on the fourth bastion, which was mercilessly shelled by enemy artillery.
God gave the day, God gave the strength.
Both the day and the strength are devoted to work, and the reward is in it itself.
(Anna Karenina)
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
Tolstoy's Sevastopol stories are not a panoramic description of the entire months long giant battle for the city, but sketches of several days from the life of its defenders.
It is in the details: in the image of everyday life of soldiers, sailors, nurses, officers, citizens — Tolstoy is looking for the true truth of the war.
The key motive of the Sevastopol stories is the unnaturalness and madness of war.
In the essay Sevastopol in December, Tolstoy describes not the impressive correctness of the battle, but the terrible scenes of the suffering of the wounded in the hospital.
He uses the technique of contrast, sharply colliding the world of the living and beautiful nature with the world of the dead victims of war.
For example, he tells about a child picking wildflowers between decomposing corpses and touching the outstretched arm of a headless dead man with his foot.
War and peace.
On November 19, 1855, he arrived in St. Petersburg.
His name is already covered with glory.
Writers and journalists of different directions hoped for cooperation with Tolstoy.
But the literary environment, the spirit of literary circles and rivalry pushed Tolstoy away from new acquaintances.
Their interests seem to him small and insignificant, life is fussy and meaningless.
Tolstoy took his soul away in carousing with gypsies and in an unrestrained card game.
In May 1856, he left St. Petersburg and settled in Yasnaya Polyana.
For the most part, it happens that you argue hotly only because you can not understand what exactly the opponent wants to prove.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
In the autumn of 1859, he opened a school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana.
He studied history with the children, gave them topics for essays.
In 1862, the school was closed after a police search.
The reason was the suspicion of the authorities that the students who taught at the Yasnaya Polyana school were engaged in anti government activities.
The writer formulated the conclusions from his activities at the Yasnaya Polyana school in an article with the" scandalous " title: Who should learn to write from whom: for peasant children from us or for us from peasant children?
According to Tolstoy, folk art and culture are not lower, but rather higher than the culture and art recognized in an educated society.
Peasant children preserve the spiritual purity and naturalness lost in the educated classes.
Their training in the values of "high" culture, Tolstoy believes, is hardly necessary.
On the contrary, the writer himself, studying with them, turned out to be not a teacher, but a student.
In 1862, he married the daughter of a Moscow doctor, Sofia Andreevna Bers.
The wedding was preceded by Tolstoy's doubts about the strength and depth of his feelings, in the ability to bring happiness to his future wife and find comfort and joy in a new, family life himself.
After the wedding, the young couple leave for Yasnaya Polyana.
On September 25, Tolstoy writes in his diary: "Incredible happiness".
Mutual misunderstanding, heavy quarrels, estrangement from each other all this is still in the distant future.
In 1863 Tolstoy published the novel The Cossacks, which he began working on in the mid 1850s.
The story, like many of his other works, is autobiographical.
It is based on Caucasian memories, first of all — the story of his unrequited love for a Cossack woman who lived in the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa.
He chooses a traditional plot for romantic literature: the love of a chilled, disillusioned hero, a fugitive from the hateful world of civilization, for a "natural" and passionate heroine.
A. S. Pushkin's poems The Caucasian Prisoner and the Gypsies were written on this plot.
The Gypsy Tolstoy reread while working on the Cossacks.
But Tolstoy gives this plot a new meaning.
The young nobleman Dmitry Olenin only superficially resembles a romantic hero: his fatigue from life is shallow.
He is drawn to the natural simplicity, the spontaneous life of the Cossacks, but remains alien to them.
Olenin's interests, upbringing, and social status alienate him from the inhabitants of the Cossack village.
The beautiful Cossack Mariana prefers the reckless Cossack Lukashka to him.
Olenin greedily absorbs the simple and wise thoughts of the old Cossack, hunter and former thief Uncle Eroshka: happiness, the meaning of life is in the intoxication of all its joys, in carnal pleasures.
But he will never be able to become as simple, carefree, kind and evil, pure and cynical at the same time as Uncle Eroshka.
Most men demand from their wives virtues that they themselves are not worth.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
From 1856 to 1863 he worked on a novel about the Decembrists.
He saw the roots of the events of December 14, 1825 in the events of the Patriotic War of 1812 — the time of the spiritual awakening of the Russian people, the unity of the nobility and ordinary people in the fight against a foreign enemy.
So the idea of the novel War and Peace arose.
The novel was written and revised during 1863-1869 (published in 1865-1869, in the editions of 1873 × 1886, some changes were made to the text).
War and peace bears little resemblance to a classic novel.
There is no traditional love triangle, love or social conflict as the basis of the plot.
Traditionally, the key elements of the novel — the climax or denouement — at that time, as a rule, were a duel, marriage or death of the characters.
Meanwhile, the marriage of one of the main characters, Pierre Bezukhov, to the empty and immoral secular beauty Helen Kuragina has little effect on the subsequent events of his life.
Pierre's duel with Helen's lover Dolokhov is not the spring of action.
Another favorite Tolstoy hero, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, dies, and the story continues.
Pierre marries Natasha Rostova.
But the novel ends not with a description of their wedding, but with a seemingly random scene an image of the dream of Nikolenka, the son of Prince Andrew.
In this dream, the two main characters — Prince Andrew and Pierre Bezukhov were united in one person, and the dream foreshadows the disasters of Pierre, the future Decembrist.
This strange, unusual novel has an open ending — the future of the family of Pierre and Natasha is unknown and only vaguely guessed.
It is not the external changes in the destinies of the heroes, but their spiritual evolution, their moral quest that constitute the true content of War and peace.
Two main lines of War and peace — the story of two friends, Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky.
They are united by the image of the young Countess Natasha Rostova, the bride of Prince Andrew, and later, after his death, Pierre's wife.
Pierre and especially Prince Andrew go through a fascination with Napoleon.
Prince Andrew dreams of great glory.
During the battle with Napoleon's army at Austerlitz, picking up a falling banner, he rushed towards the enemy, wanting to drag the soldiers with him.
Suddenly, he is seriously injured.
He falls to the ground and sees the blue sky high above him.
This sky for Prince Andrew becomes it is a symbol of the highest divine harmony and the true greatness of life.
He sees clearly, frees himself from spiritual blindness: "How quietly, calmly and solemnly, not at all like I was running... not at all like the clouds are crawling across this high, endless sky.
How is it that I have not seen this high sky before?
And how happy I am that I finally found out.
Yes!
everything is empty, everything is a deception, except for this endless sky."
Andrei Bolkonsky comprehends at this moment all the lies of Napoleon's greatness and his vain aspirations.
Images of nature in War and peace are symbols of the highest harmony, a revelation of the truth of the world.
They are opposed to the vanity, egoism, the baseness of the false life of people (first of all, people of the upper world), alien to spiritual aspirations.
The rebirth of the devastated Prince Andrew, who has lost the meaning of existence, who has lost his wife, is symbolized by an old withered oak tree that lets out fresh young shoots in the spring.
Captured by the French, Pierre Bezukhov, who experienced the horror of being shot, realizes in captivity that his main value, which is beyond anyone's control, is an immortal soul.
This liberating feeling comes to Pierre when he contemplates the starry night sky.
The beauty of life is embodied for the heroes of War and peace Pierre and Prince Andrew and in the image of the truly poetic and sincere Natasha Rostova.
Accidentally overheard on a moonlit night in the Otradnoye estate, an enthusiastic Natasha's conversation with her cousin Sonya returns the happiness of youth and the spontaneity of feelings to Prince Andrew.
A true marriage is only one that illuminates love.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
The trait of Tolstoy's favorite heroes is the ability to spiritual growth.
Both Pierre and Prince Andrew are freed from false ideas thanks to communication with ordinary Russian people.
For Prince Andrew, this is Captain Tushin and his subordinate artillery soldiers, whom he met in the battle with Napoleon at Schoengraben.
Pierre discovers the highest value of simplicity from the soldiers he sees on the Borodino field.
The soldier Platon Karataev helps Pierre to understand that the meaning of life is in itself, in its simple and natural joys, in intuitive trust in life, in the humble acceptance of the troubles and joys that fall to a person.
Naturalness in the novel is opposed to a false, superficial life.
Natasha Rostova is simple and natural — a young "countess" who selflessly performs a Russian folk dance.
Russian soldiers are simple, alien to acting and falsehood, performing feats on a daily basis, without thoughts of glory.
The Russian commander Kutuzov is simple, who, like Platon Karataev, embodies the fullness of the acquired meaning of life.
Both Andrey and Pierre are moving towards liberation from petty and selfish feelings.
Andrey, mortally wounded at Borodin, finds infinite love for all people, and then, on the eve of his death, complete detachment from all earthly worries and worries, the highest peace.
Pierre finds peace and happiness in a quiet family life with Natasha.
These characters are contrasted with the poseur Napoleon, who enthusiastically plays the role of a"great man".
It is reminiscent of numerous "Napoleons" and "Napoleons" — the Russian Emperor Alexander I, the dignitary Speransky, the maid of honor Anna Scherer, the Kuragin family, the careerist Boris Drubetskoy and the calculating Julie Karagina, who are playing love, and many others.
These characters are endowed with an exaggerated idea of their own meaning, they are internally empty and insensitive, they are thirsty for fame, purely carnal passion, they care about their career, they like to talk beautifully and a lot.
But they do not know love for their neighbor, they do not feel the highest meaning of being.
Be truthful even in relation to the child: fulfill the promise, otherwise you will teach him to lie.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
In the novel, historical scenes and scenes of private, family life are equalized in their meaning.
Tolstoy describes in equal detail the Battle of Austerlitz, the Battle of Borodino, the military council of the Russian army headquarters in Fili and the first ball of Natasha Rostova, the hunting of old Count Rostov and the conversations of Pierre and Natasha about the health of children.
"Historical "chapters in War and Peace alternate with "family" ones.
Tolstoy perceives what is happening precisely from the point of view of a private, "outsider" person, and not from the point of view of a commander or a statesman.
Thus, the Battle of Borodino was seen through the eyes of a civilian — Pierre Bezukhov, who knows nothing about military science.
In Tolstoy's view, the private, family life of ordinary people is the same historical event, worthy of the attention of a historian and writer no less than the negotiations of tsars and diplomats or military victories.
The combination of" family " chapters with a detailed description of historical events, the pairing of several storylines, the inclusion of many dozens of characters in his text have become features completely new for the modern Tolstoy novel.
Later researchers called War and Peace an epic novel.
In the historical and philosophical chapters of War and Peace, Tolstoy reveals his understanding of the meaning and laws of history.
In his opinion, historical events are determined by the coincidence of many reasons, and therefore people cannot understand the laws of history.
Tolstoy bitterly and acrimoniously polemizes with the opinion about the decisive role of great people — tsars, generals, diplomats — in history.
The higher a person's place in society and in the state, the more circumstances he must take into account — " he notes.
A truly great man does not interfere in the mysterious, incomprehensible course of history.
He only feels its laws in his heart and strives to contribute to the course of events.
This is exactly what Kutuzov is like in Tolstoy's image, not caring about military plans, behaving allegedly passively and absent mindedly on the eve of decisive battles.
That is why, the writer convinces, the winner is Kutuzov, and not Napoleon, who carefully developed military plans, but did not feel the hidden course of events, who forgot that the moral rightness in the war of 1812 was on the side of the Russians.
Tolstoy rejected historical science, considering it quackery.
He admitted that the movement of history is determined not by the will of people, but by Providence, Fate.
Be both careful, attentive more than anything else to mutual relations, so that the habits of irritation and alienation do not creep in.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
Anna Karenina.
In 1877 Tolstoy finished his second novel, Anna Karenina (published in 1876-1877).
His main character, Anna Karenina, is a delicate and conscientious nature, she is connected with Count Vronsky by a real, strong feeling.
Anna's husband, a high ranking official Karenin, seems to be soulless and callous, although he is capable of high, truly human, kind feelings.
Tolstoy creates circumstances that would seem to justify Anna.
She is open and honest, does not hide her relationship with Vronsky and seeks to get a divorce from her husband.
And yet Tolstoy apparently condemns Anna.
The price for cheating on her husband is the suicide of the heroine, while her death, according to the author's plan, is a manifestation of divine judgment.
It is not for nothing that Tolstoy chose the words of God from the biblical book of Deuteronomy in the Church Slavonic translation as an epigraph to the novel:"Vengeance is upon me, and I will repay you".
In addition, according to Tolstoy, not only Anna deserves the highest court, but also other characters who have committed sin — first of all, Vronsky.
Anna's fault for Tolstoy is in avoiding the purpose of a wife and mother.
The relationship with Vronsky is not only a violation of marital duty.
It leads to the destruction of the Karenin family: their son Seryozha is now growing up without a mother, and Anna and her husband are fighting with each other for their son.
Anna's love for Vronsky, according to Tolstoy, is not a high feeling in which the spiritual principle prevails over the physical attraction, but a blind and destructive passion.
Its symbol is a furious snowstorm, during which the explanation of Anna and Vronsky takes place.
The novel combines three storylines the stories of three families.
They are both similar and different at the same time.
Anna chooses love, ruining her family.
Dolly, the wife of her brother Stiva Oblonsky, for the sake of the happiness and well being of the children, reconciles with her unfaithful husband.
Konstantin Levin, marrying Dolly's young and charming sister, Kitty Shcherbatskaya, seeks to create a spiritual and pure marriage in which husband and wife become a single, similarly feeling and thinking being.
On this path, temptations and difficulties lie in wait for him.
The story of Levin's marriage to Kitty, their marriage and Levin's spiritual quest is autobiographical.
It largely reproduces the episodes of the marriage and family life of Lev Nikolaevich and Sofia Andreevna.
A distinctive artistic feature of the novel is the repetition of situations and images that serve as predictions and foreshadows.
Anna and Vronsky meet at the railway station.
At the moment of the first meeting, when Anna accepted a sign of attention from a new acquaintance, the train coupler was crushed by the train.
At the railway station, Vronsky and Anna's explanation also takes place.
The image of the railway is correlated in the novel with the motives of passion, a deadly threat, with cold and soulless metal.
Anna's death and Vronsky's guilt are predicted in the horse racing scene, when Vronsky, because of his awkwardness, breaks the back of the beautiful mare Frou Frou.
The death of the horse seems to foreshadow the fate of Anna.
Anna's dreams are symbolic, in which she sees a man working with iron.
His image echoes the images of railway employees and is covered with menace and death.
In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy repeatedly uses the technique of an internal monologue, describing chaotic, randomly alternating observations, impressions of the surrounding world and the thoughts of the heroine.
Sometimes the work is unnecessary, fussy, impatient, irritated, interfering with others and drawing attention to itself.
Such work is much worse than a holiday osti.
Real work is always quiet, uniform, imperceptible.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
Crisis.
Later creativity.
In the second half of the 1860s — in the 1870s, Tolstoy was experiencing a painful spiritual crisis.
In 1869, he went to see an estate in the Penza province, which he hoped to buy profitably.
On the way, I spent the night at the Arzamas hotel.
He fell asleep, but suddenly woke up in horror: he imagined that he was going to die.
Tolstoy described his feelings in the unfinished story Notes of a Madman, on which he worked in 1885-1886.
The fear of death, the feeling of emptiness and the meaninglessness of life haunted Tolstoy for several years.
He tried to seek solace in philosophy, in the Orthodox faith and in other religions.
But he did not receive a clear and close answer about the meaning of life from either philosophers or theologians.
Philosophy and existing religions seemed to Tolstoy to be meaningless and unnecessary.
He was repeatedly visited by thoughts of suicide.
The crisis was overcome at the turn of the 1870s 1880s.
Tolstoy comes to recognize the extra rational, intuitive folk religiosity as the only answer to the question of the meaning of life.
He saw the destiny and duty of the nobles, intellectuals — all those who belong to the privileged classes in the pollination, in likening himself to people from the people, peasants.
At the same time, he did not accept and did not understand the popular belief in the miraculous and otherworldly.
The New faith, which Tolstoy taught in his religious and philosophical writings of the 1880s and later, was primarily a moral teaching.
For Tolstoy, God is the highest, purest principle in the human soul, the embodiment of a moral principle.
Tolstoy considered the existing Christian religions, in particular, Orthodoxy, to be perverting the spirit and essence of the commandments, the creeds of Christ.
He could not accept the extra rational, super rational in theology (church dogmas).
He reproached the church for reconciling with violence or even justifying violence.
According to Tolstoy, any violence is unacceptable in human society.
The overcoming of evil, the victory over it and the realization of the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood are possible only through the moral improvement of each person.
Tolstoy told about overcoming the spiritual crisis and about his new faith in Confession (written in 1879-1882, published in 1884).
Being truthful and honest with children, without hiding from them what is happening in the soul, is the only education.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
Tolstoy rethought his entire life.
He comes to the conclusion that only the life of ordinary people is close to moral truths.
In the article What is art? (1898)
he rejects everything in world culture created by people from the ruling classes and classes.
According to Tolstoy, the only true function of art is to give "knowledge of the difference between good and evil", and this function is fully fulfilled only by art created by ordinary people.
The poverty and suffering of the destitute were painfully experienced by Tolstoy.
He was one of the organizers of public assistance to starving peasants in 1891.
He considers personal labor, primarily physical labor, the rejection of wealth, of property acquired through the work of others, necessary for wealthy people.
He wrote about this in the journalistic work So what should we do?, which he worked on in 1882-1886.
Tolstoy came to the idea that private ownership of land is unnatural, that a state that resorts to violence, to cruel punishments, should not exist.
In 1908, I learned about the execution by hanging in the city of Kherson of twelve peasants who participated in actions against the landowners and responded to the incident with the article I can not be silent.
The ideas of the late Tolstoy resemble the socialist doctrine.
But unlike the socialists, he was a staunch opponent of the revolution.
And he saw the path to human happiness primarily not in social and economic changes, but in the moral self improvement of each person.
Moderation of desires, a modest life, alien to luxury, liberation from passions, restriction or suppression of sexual desire — these, according to Tolstoy, should be moral guidelines.
In an immoral society, all inventions that increase the power of man over nature are not only not good, but an undoubted and obvious evil.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
The position of the late Tolstoy is the position of a prophet, a denouncer of public and state unrighteousness, proclaiming the doctrine of universal brotherly love and labor.
Tolstoy, a publicist and teacher of life, has gained great fame not only in Russia, but also around the world.
Yasnaya Polyana becomes a place of pilgrimage: people from different classes and from many countries come to Tolstoy for advice.
On February 22, 1901, the Synod — the highest church body in Russia at that time - issued a ruling on Tolstoy's excommunication from the church, pointing out the anti Orthodox spirit of Tolstoy's teaching.
But the excommunication did not shake Tolstoy's exceptional influence on Russian society.
In the south of Russia, his followers — the Tolstoyans created agricultural communes, lived together, cultivating the land.
In the work of the late Tolstoy, the desire for simplicity of style and direct edification were clearly manifested.
He created numerous works written in imitation of folk legends and fairy tales, in which he expressed his understanding of the teachings of Christ, ideas about a decent and righteous life and about an ideal society.
Perversity, the wrongness of people's lives, the structure of society — the main theme of the work of the late Tolstoy.
The story of Father Sergius (Tolstoy worked on it in the 1890s, published after his death in 1911) depicts the life story of Prince Stepan Kasatsky, who becomes a monk Sergius, an extremely proud man who comes through the temptation of fame to the simple humble life of a poor wanderer.
In the story of the Kreutzer Sonata (1887-1889), Tolstoy presented sexual love between a man and a woman as a low, unworthy feeling.
In the play The Living Corpse (1900, published posthumously, in 1911), the author focuses on the abnormality of laws and authorities that force spouses who have fallen out of love and are ready to part with each other to continue living together.
The main character of the play, Fedya Protasov, feels the emptiness of the surrounding society and finds a way out in a drunken revelry.
The desire to untie the tangled knot of relations with his abandoned wife Lisa and with Viktor Karenin, who loves her, honest, but limited and does not understand Protasov, leads the main character to suicide.
In the matter of cunning, a stupid person spends more intelligent ones.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
In the story Kholstomer (1885, the first version — 1864-1865), the ugliness of the relations reigning among people is exposed thanks to a special technique: everything that happens is depicted in the perception of the horse gelding Kholstomer.
The story is based on contrast: the tragic life of the wise Kholstomer — and the story of the meaningless existence of his former master, the depraved and selfish Prince Serpukhov.
Insight hero, moral, spiritual transformation on the verge of death, the plot of the novels the Death of Ivan Ilyich (1881-1882, 1884-1886, published in 1886) and the Master and worker (1894-1895).
A terminally ill high official Ivan Ilyich becomes convinced of how empty his life was, in which he followed the same rules and habits that other people in his circle.
The story is based on the contrast of Ivan Ilyich's new ideas about life and the opinions peculiar to his family and colleagues.
The hero of the second story, the innkeeper, greedy and alien to the reproaches of conscience, Brekhunov unexpectedly saves his employee Nikita at the cost of his life.
From 1889 to 1899, Tolstoy worked on his last novel, The Resurrection.
The plot of the Resurrection is based on the moral revival of a rich nobleman Dmitry Ivanovich Nekhludov and a prostitute Katyusha Maslova, whom Nekhludov once seduced.
In the Resurrection, Tolstoy refuses his favorite technique the depiction of the experiences of the heroes — the "dialectic of the soul".
The description of the complex movement of contradictory experiences is replaced by direct judgments by Nekhludoff's assessments of himself and the people around him.
Tolstoy describes a paradoxical, "inverted" situation: Nekhludoff, who is guilty of Katyusha Maslova's moral fall, turns out to be her legal judge.
He is among the jurors who decide on the guilt of Maslova (Maslova is suspected of involvement in the poisoning of a merchant visitor to a brothel).
The laws of the birth of the language live and always act in folk speech.
Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich
Tolstoy depicts a whole gallery of characters from different classes — dignitaries, criminal criminals, revolutionaries.
The author of the novel acts as a ruthless judge of the modern social and state system.
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Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy quotes
The doctors went to Natasha separately and in consultations, spoke a lot in French, German and Latin, condemned each other, prescribed a variety of medicines for all diseases known to them; but none of them came up with the simple idea that they could not know the disease that Natasha suffered from, just as no disease that a living person is obsessed with can be known: for every living person has its own characteristics and always has a special and new, complex, unknown to medicine, not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, etc., recorded in medicine, but a disease consisting of one of the countless compounds in the suffering of these organs.
This simple thought could not come to doctors (just as a sorcerer cannot come to the idea that he cannot do magic) because their life's work was to treat, because they received money for it, and because they spent the best years of their lives on this business.
But the main thing is that this thought could not come to the doctors because they saw that they were undoubtedly useful, and were really useful for all the household Rostovs.
They were useful not because they forced the patient to swallow mostly harmful substances (this harm was not very sensitive, because harmful substances were given in small quantities), but they were useful, necessary, inevitable (the reason is why there are always and will be imaginary healers, fortune tellers, homeopaths and allopaths) because they satisfied the moral needs of the patient and people who love the patient.
They satisfied the eternal human need for hope for relief, the need for sympathy and activity that a person experiences during suffering.
They satisfied that eternal, human — noticeable in the child in the most primitive form need to rub the place that is bruised.
The child will be killed and immediately runs into the hands of the mother, the nurse, in order to be kissed and rubbed the sore spot, and it becomes easier for him when the sore spot is rubbed or kissed.
The child does not believe that his strongest and wisest do not have the means to help his pain.
And the hope of relief and an expression of sympathy while his mother rubs his bump, comfort him...
According to a person's life, according to his deeds, both now and then, it is impossible to know in any way whether he is an Orthodox believer or not.
Even on the contrary, in most cases: moral life, honesty, truthfulness, kindness to people were found and are found more often in non believers.
On the contrary, the recognition of one's Orthodoxy and the visual performance of its rites are mostly found in immoral, cruel, high — ranking people who use violence for their lusts wealth, pride, sensuality.
I am not for the Russian or Japanese governments, but for the deceived working people of both countries, who are forced to fight against their well being, conscience and religion.
To love is to live the life of the one you love.
To live honestly, you have to rush, get confused, make mistakes, start and quit... and always fight and lose.
And calmness is spiritual meanness.
All quotes by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Number of views: 6498
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