Today is the birthday of novelist
Leo Tolstoy
born into nobility near Tula, Russia in1828.
This brief summary of his life was sent to me by The Writer's Almanac - why not join the Group and give them a hand by joining up with Garrison Keillor. You will receive a wealth of information of which this is a very small part.
"Apart from the pain of losing
his mother as a young boy, his childhood was one of relative ease: He
read books from his father's extensive library, went swimming and
sledding, listened to stories, and played in the fields and woods on his
family's large estate. After his father died, he lived with relatives
and then enrolled at the University of Kazan. His teachers thought he
wasn't very bright, and although he managed to teach himself about 12
languages, he was
less interested in academics than he was in gambling, drinking, and
women. He dropped out of college and spent years visiting brothels,
binge drinking, and racking up such huge gambling debts that he had to
sell off part of his estate. Finally, Tolstoy's brother suggested that
he needed a change and encouraged him to sign up for the army. He
agreed, joining his brother's artillery unit
in the Caucasus in the spring of 1851. The following winter, 23-year-old
Tolstoy wrote his first novel,
Childhood (1852). It was
praised by Turgenev and established Tolstoy's reputation as a writer.
Over the next few years, he published two more novels in the same vein,
Boyhood (1854) and
Youth (1856).
In
1854, he was promoted and sent to the front to fight in the Crimean
War. He was horrified by the violence of war, and in 1857, he witnessed a
public execution in Paris, which affected him deeply as well. He wrote:
"During my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the
instability of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head
part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I
understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of
the
reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that
though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be
necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and
therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say
and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I."
By 1863, he had finished a draft of what would become the first part of a novel he was calling
1805. It
was set during the Napoleonic Wars and the French invasion of Russia,
but he channeled his experiences in the Crimean War. A version of
1805 was
published in 1865, but Tolstoy did not like it, so he went to work
rewriting and expanding the novel. He gave it a new name:
War and Peace.
In 1867, the first three sections of
War and Peace were
published, and sold out in a matter of days. Tolstoy began writing
furiously, publishing the sections as he wrote them, and finally, in
December of 1869, he published the sixth and final volume. He said,
"What I have written there was not simply imagined by me, but torn out
of my cringing entrails."
Tolstoy did not think of his new book as a novel. He published an
article in 1868, even before the final parts of book had come out,
called "A Few Words Apropos of the Book
War and Peace." In the article, he wrote: "What is
War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle.
War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed." Tolstoy published
Anna Karenina
between 1873 and 1877, and he declared that it was his first true novel."
Many Thanks to the Writer's Almanac
Should you wish to study Tolstoy further then
Should you wish to get a free download
