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TOLSTOY, Lev Nikolaevich

Russian novelist (1828-1910)

In his 60s and beyond Tolstoy became famous as a kind of moral guru or secular saint: he preached the equal value' of all human beings, and suited actions to words by giving away his wealth, freeing his serfs and living an austere life in a cottage on the edge of his former estate. A similar view underlies his fiction. His ambition was to enter into the condition of each of his characters, to show the psychological complexity and diversity of the human race. His books are not tidily organised, with every event and emotion shaped to fit a central theme, but reflect the sprawl of life itself. The result was a psychological equivalent of Balzac's 'snapshots' in The Human Comedy. Whether Tolstoy is showing us a coachman who comes and goes in half a page, or a major character who appears throughout a book, he invites us to feel full sympathy for that person, makes us flesh out his or her reality' in terms of our own.

WAR AND PEACE  (1869) The book begins with people at a St Petersburg party in 1805 discussing the political situation in France, where Napoleon has just been proclaimed emperor. Tolstoy then fills 100 pages with seemingly random accounts of the lives and characters of a large group of relatives, friends, servants and dependants of three aristocrats, Andrey Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezuhov and Natasha Rostov. Gradually all these people become involved both with one another and with the gathering storm as Napoleon's armies sweep through Europe. The story culminates with the 1812 French invasion of Russia, Napoleon's defeat and his retreat from Moscow. The war touches the lives of all Tolstoy's people, and in particular resolves the triangle of affection between his central characters. The effects of war are the real subject of War and Peace. It contains 539 separate characters -- the range is from Napoleon to the girl who dresses Rostov's hair, from Bolkonsky to an eager young soldier sharpening his sword on the eve of battle -- and Tolstoy shows how their individual nature and feelings are both essential to and validated by the vast tapestry of human affairs of which they are part.

Tolstoy's other novels include Anna Karenina (in which an adulterous and tragic love-affair is used to focus a picture of the stifling, morally incompetent aristocratic Russian society of the 1860s), The Death of Ivan Illich, The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man and Resurrection. His autobiographical books include Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and A Confession.

READ ON

Anna Karenina

To War and Peace : Bernice Rubens, Mother Russia André Malraux, Man's Estate I.B. Singer, The Family Moskat Emile Zola, The Downfall (Le débacle) see also pathway

To Anna Karenina : George Eliot, Romola Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, On the Eve

 more :Tags  Pathways  Themes & Places

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The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

(1880s New York heiress rejects ways of society to 'be herself')

Against the Odds

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights  (1800s Yorkshire: a woman loves brutal, "child-of-nature" foster-brother)

Hermann Hesse, Gertrud  (1890s German university: two students, friends, love the same woman)

Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris  (14th-century Paris: hunchback tries to protect beautiful gipsy from mne who would debauch her)

Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard  (12-th century Paris: a monk falls in love with beautiful pupil)

"Playthings of Destiny"

Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd  (tragic life and love in 19th-century rural England)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair  (two girls" ambitions to conquer 1810s English high society)

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy  (ambition, crime and punishment in lower class 1920s New York)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables  (New England family cursed for generations because of religious intolerance)

Pressure to Conform

John Updike, Rabbit, Run  (ex-high-school sports star tries to adjust to adult mediocrity)

Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne  (snobbery, illegitimacy and inheritance among 19th-century English landed gentry)

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt  (wealthy, morally empty merchant tries to break free of sterile small-town conformity)

Angus Wilson, Late Call  (widow lives with uncongenial son in soulless 1960s British "new town")

Stifling Communities

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary  (mid-19th-century small-town France)

Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest  (retreat for psychological misfits on island "paradise")

Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates  ("progressive" US university)

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (21st-century fundamentalist Republic of Gilead)