Peasant’s helped troubled Tolstoy find meaning of life

RUSSIAN author and pacifist Leo Tolstoy was born 190 years ago tomorrow.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

ASIDE from its lengthy description of an army marching down the street, Leo Tolstoy’s doorstop novel War And Peace is also nominated for the “worst opening sentence of any major novel, ever”.

But like his other epic, Anna Karenina, size and complexity did not slow acceptance of War And Peace as a literary masterpiece.

His three-edition chronicle of the Napoleonic era from the summer of 1805 in St Petersburg, to the French army’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia and slow collapse of Tsartist Russia, runs to about 1200 pages and, as demonstrated in Russia in 2015, takes 60 hours to recite.

Anna Karenina is almost a light read at about 864 pages, and is recognised for one of the most engaging opening lines in literature, observing that “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Born to a wealthy, aristocratic family in Tula, south of Moscow, 190 years ago tomorrow, Tolstoy wrote to his wife Sonya on March 2 1877, that “In order for a book to be good, one has to love its basic, fundamental idea. Thus, in Anna Karenina, I loved the idea of the family.”’

Russian author Leo Tolstoy. p

Aside from literary masterpieces, Tolstoy had a lesser-known following as an early advocate of nonviolence to resolve nationalist disputes, influencing the political protests of Indian independence campaigner Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, although ignored in his own nation.

Commenting on reading Jesus’ words in the Gospels, Tolstoy complained the modern church was heretical: “Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.”

Born into the Russian Orthodox Church on September 9, 1828, after writing War and Peace between 1863 and 1869, Tolstoy underwent an existential crisis, seized by a sense of futility, given that death was inevitable. Although not horrified by death, he feared that life seemed to have no meaning.

Tolstoy’s wife Countess Sophia (or also known as Sonya).

After writing Anna Karenina between 1873 and 1877, Tolstoy tried to find the meaning of life in great thinkers of science, religion and philosophy, without success, and contemplated suicide. His breakthrough came from observing peasants, who apparently approached death with calm serenity. Deciding this acceptance came from their faith, Tolstoy began to study the Bible with renewed enthusiasm, hoping to find the meaning of life.

In 1884 he “wrote a book under the title What I Believe, in which I did in fact make a sincere statement of my beliefs. In affirming my belief in Christ’s teaching, I could not help explaining why I do not believe, and consider as mistaken, the Church’s doctrine, which is usually called Christianity.”

This was expanded in The Kingdom Of God Is Within You, banned in Russia after it was published in Germany in 1894. In it Tolstoy described the hazards of bullying governments and false beliefs.

Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky at Tolstoy's family estate Yasnaya Polyana in 1900.

Tolstoy (centre foreground with racquet) playing tennis with family and friends at the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, southwest of Moscow in 1900.

“The situation of the Christian part of humanity, with its prisons, forced labour, gallows, saloons, brothels, constantly increasing armaments, and millions of confused people ready like trained hounds to attack anyone against whom their masters set them, this situation would be terrible if it were the product of coercion, but it is above all the product of public opinion,” he observed. Rejecting the violence of revolution, Tolstoy appeals to Christians to remember the only guide for their actions is “the divine principle dwelling within them”, which cannot be checked or governed by anyone or anything else.

Tolstoy’s first published work was his autobiographical Childhood, in 1852, while his first experience of the randomness of death came as a soldier witnessing slaughter in the Crimean War in 1854-55, when he wrote a sequel titled Boyhood in 1854.

His brother Dmitry died from tuberculosis in 1856, and in Paris in 1857 the appalling spectacle of a man being guillotined helped make him a staunch opponent of the death penalty. Later, five of his 13 children died before they were 10. Tolstoy visited death in his 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the story of the final months of a reasonably prosperous and successful middle-aged Russian judge as he dies from a terminal illness.

Tolstoy was 82 when he died from pneumonia at the railway station of Astapovo, a remote Russian village, on November 7, 1910. He had left his family home at Yasnaya Polyana in the middle of the night of October 28, walking out on Sonya, his wife of 48 years.