Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born on 9 September 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in Tula province, about 130 miles south of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy and Princess Mariya Nikolayevna Volkonskaya. Both parents died when he was young — his mother when he was two, his father when he was nine — and he was raised by relatives. The estate at Yasnaya Polyana, with its forests, peasant villages, and inherited aristocratic privilege, was the centre of his life from birth until death.

Life and Career

Tolstoy studied Oriental languages and law at Kazan University without taking a degree. In 1851, restless and dissipated, he joined the army and served in the Caucasus and later in the Crimean War, where his Sevastopol Sketches (1855) — coolly realistic accounts of the siege — established his literary reputation. After the war he travelled in Europe, returned to Yasnaya Polyana, and began the pedagogical experiments (founding schools for peasant children, writing educational primers) that reflected his lifelong concern with the moral responsibility of the privileged.

In 1862 he married Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, eighteen years old to his thirty-four. The marriage began in passionate love and produced thirteen children (eight survived to adulthood), but it became, over the decades, a legendary marital catastrophe — the subject of competing diaries, recriminations, and mutual suffering that only worsened as Tolstoy’s religious convictions deepened.

The period 1863–1877 produced the two greatest novels. War and Peace (1869), which Tolstoy himself declined to call a novel, is a vast narrative of Russian society during the Napoleonic Wars, encompassing five aristocratic families, the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow, and a sustained philosophical meditation on the nature of history and free will. Anna Karenina (1877) narrows the focus to the intertwined stories of Anna’s adulterous love affair and Levin’s search for meaning in rural life; it is the most perfectly constructed of the great novels.

In the late 1870s Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis — described in A Confession (1882) — that transformed him from a novelist into a religious teacher. He developed a radical form of Christianity that rejected the Orthodox Church, the state, private property, and violence, and advocated a life of simplicity, manual labour, and nonresistance to evil. He renounced his literary works as vanity (though he continued to write, producing the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich in 1886 and the novel Resurrection in 1899), attempted to give away his estate and copyrights, and lived increasingly in conflict with his wife, who fought to preserve the family’s property.

In October 1910, at eighty-two, Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana in the middle of the night, accompanied only by his doctor and his youngest daughter. He collapsed at the railway junction of Astapovo and died there on 20 November 1910, with the world’s press gathered outside.

Major Works and Themes

Tolstoy’s genius lies in his ability to render the texture of lived experience — the way consciousness moves, the way the body feels, the way social interactions unfold in real time — with an immediacy that no other novelist has equalled. His range is total: he can describe a battle, a ball, a death, a childbirth, a hunt, a harvest, a parliamentary debate, and a moment of religious illumination with equal authority.

War and Peace (1869) is the most ambitious novel ever written. Its canvas encompasses all of Russian society, from peasants to emperors, and its philosophical scope — the relationship between individual will and the forces of history — gives it the weight of epic. Prince Andrei, Pierre Bezukhov, and Natasha Rostova are among the most fully realised characters in all fiction.

Anna Karenina (1877) is the most perfect novel. The dual narrative — Anna’s passion and destruction, Levin’s spiritual quest — creates a counterpoint of extraordinary richness. Anna herself is one of literature’s great tragic heroines, and her final journey to the Moscow railway station is one of the most devastating sequences in all fiction.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is perhaps the greatest novella ever written: a mercilessly honest account of a conventional man confronting his own death, and through that confrontation discovering the emptiness of the life he has lived.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Tolstoy was recognized as the greatest living writer during his own lifetime, and his stature has never diminished. The question of whether he or Dostoevsky is the greater Russian novelist is one of the great critical debates — most critics acknowledge that each represents a supreme and complementary achievement. His influence on subsequent fiction is incalculable: Proust, Mann, Hemingway, and virtually every realist novelist of the twentieth century has acknowledged his debt.

Beyond literature, Tolstoy’s moral and political philosophy influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the tradition of nonviolent resistance worldwide.

Key Works

• Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852–1857)
• Sevastopol Sketches (1855)
• War and Peace (1869)
• Anna Karenina (1877)
• A Confession (1882)
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
• The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
• Resurrection (1899)
• Hadji Murad (1912, posthumous)

Collecting Tolstoy

Collecting Tolstoy first editions is a specialized field dominated by Russian-language bibliography. The original Russian editions were published in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and true first editions in Russian are sought by a small but dedicated group of collectors worldwide.

War and Peace was first published in the journal Russkii vestnik (The Russian Messenger) in serial form (1865–1869) and then in book form (1869, in six volumes). First editions of the book form are extremely rare and valuable — a complete set in good condition can command $50,000–$200,000 at auction, though examples surface very infrequently.

Anna Karenina was serialized in Russkii vestnik (1875–1877) and published in book form in 1878. First book editions are comparably rare.

For anglophone collectors, the significant first English translations are the primary targets. The first English-language translation of War and Peace (by Clara Bell, 1886, Vizetelly) and Anna Karenina (by Nathan Haskell Dole, 1886, Thomas Y. Crowell) are collected as the first appearances in English. Fine copies are scarce and bring $1,000–$5,000.

The Constance Garnett translations (published in the early twentieth century by William Heinemann) were for decades the standard English versions and are collected in their own right.

Tolstoy autograph material is rare on the market. His manuscripts and correspondence are held principally in Russian archives, particularly at Yasnaya Polyana (now a museum) and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Letters in Western languages surface very occasionally and command substantial prices.