4. Death

Death was a fact of Tolstoy’s life from the start. He lost both of his parents during childhood and then, as a young man, Tolstoy witnessed and caused death at war. Death continued to haunt him. Whether he was writing about a war zone, a pastoral landscape, a slum, or a family estate, Tolstoy’s works are set in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’. One of Tolstoy’s missions as a writer was to remind readers of their own mortality and to make them think about how to live and love in the face of death. ‘Death’ discusses Tolstoy’s treatment of dying in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’.

2. Tolstoy on war and on peace

Tolstoy is often hailed as the father of the modern war story. What makes Tolstoy’s writing on war so good—and so modern—is how he seems to tell the truth about war. As he drew on his first-hand experience of warfare in the Caucasus and Crimea, Tolstoy made it clear that he was not going to repeat old lies to the effect that ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. ‘Tolstoy on war and on peace’ explains that Tolstoy went further in his truth-telling to reveal not just that war is hell, but that it violates the ‘law of love’ that the participants profess. It explores ‘The Raid’, the Sevastopol tales, War and Peace, and Hadji Murat.

5. What Tolstoy believed

As he approached the age of 50, Tolstoy experienced what is often described as a spiritual crisis. He struggled to finish Anna Karenina and then devoted the next several years to religious life. He returned to the fold of the Russian Orthodox Church, but soon doubted the Church’s doctrines, rituals, and practices. Tolstoy found faith on his own terms. Love of God and neighbour and non-violence were at the core. ‘What Tolstoy believed’ discusses the religious ideas that Tolstoy explored in his fiction and set forth more directly in works such as his Confession, Translation and Harmonization of the Gospels, The Gospel in Brief, What I Believe, and The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

8. Tolstoy cannot be silent

For his last thirty years, from Confession to ‘I Cannot Be Silent’, Tolstoy often spoke out in the first person, dispensing with the veil of fiction. These late works were widely disseminated. In ‘I Cannot Be Silent’, Tolstoy spoke out with the intention of inspiring and provoking everyone, from the tsar to readers around the globe. This felt more urgent to him as he approached death. ‘Tolstoy cannot be silent’ considers how in ‘I Cannot Be Silent’, Tolstoy shows—in a highly concentrated form—the devices, techniques, and subject matter that give his fiction its power. Tolstoy returned to the questions about love, death, brotherhood, and the pain of others that he had posed from the start.

6. What then must we do?

In his later years, Tolstoy occupied himself with questions of social justice. Tolstoy wrote on a number of topics, including poverty, the allocation of goods and privileges, class relations, landownership, manual labour, famine, charity, civil disobedience, non-violence, and the ethics of diet. Tolstoy had been concerned with these questions earlier, both in his fiction and in his own life. But, inspired by his newly articulated faith, he felt the need to address these social issues more directly. For Tolstoy, faith and action went hand in hand. ‘What then must we do?’ considers how Tolstoy addressed these issues in What Then Must We Do?, Resurrection, and other works.

1. From Ant Brothers to loving all as brothers and sisters

At his death in 1910, Tolstoy was known as a great writer and as a voice of protest. He was a merciless critic of institutions that perpetrated, bred, or tolerated injustice, hatred, and violence in any form. Among literary critics and rival writers, it has been a commonplace to disparage Tolstoy’s ‘thought’ while praising his ‘art’. ‘From Ant Brothers to loving all as brothers and sisters’ describes the childhood game that Tolstoy played with his siblings, which contains many hallmarks of Tolstoy’s thought and art: the yearning for universal love, the aversion to violence and war, the transformation of the everyday world through imagination, and the search for human comfort in the shadow of death.

7. Tolstoy’s art and devices

In criticism of Tolstoy’s work, many suggest that Tolstoy’s realism was at the expense of artistry or form, but ‘Tolstoy’s art and devices’ explains how Tolstoy used a variety of techniques to ‘infect’ the readers of his fiction and non-fiction with what was in his soul. It also describes the art beneath the surface of Tolstoy’s seemingly faithful rendering of Russian reality. Numerous examples from his work are given to show how Tolstoy depicted the inner life of his characters, and how he used the concept of defamiliarization, similes, the power of comparisons, and hidden symmetries.

3. Love

Tolstoy’s love life has been extensively documented and debated. Tolstoy himself addressed all this directly in letters, in diaries, and in frank conversation with memoirists; others involved, including his wife, also left their own accounts. ‘Love’ explains that Tolstoy’s major fiction, known for its autobiographical and ‘autopsychological’ elements, roughly follows the trajectory of Tolstoy’s life and loves. It documents Tolstoy’s views on love, sex, marriage, adultery, and family happiness in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’; and ‘Alyosha Pot’. Tolstoyan heroes are often haunted by the Ant Brothers’ dream of love and happiness for all. It may be an insurmountable obstacle on their course toward family happiness or sexual bliss.