Tolstoi, or TOLSTOY, a noble Russian family, several of whose members have become eminent in diplomacy, war, and literature. Count Peter (1645-1729) was long a trusted agent of Peter the Great; Count Peter Alexandrovitch (1761-1844), one of Suvarov's generals, was under Nicholas I. head of a government department; Count Alexei Constantinovitch (1818-75) was one of the foremost of modern Russian dramatists, a lyrical poet and novelist (his historical novel, Prince Serebrenni, was translated into English in 1874); Count Dmitry Andreievitch (1823-89), reactionary minister of Education, was a champion of Russian orthodoxy and the Russifier of the Poles, whose Romanism in Russia was translated in 1874. But far better known outside of Russia is
Count LEO NIKOLAIEVITCH, poet, novelist, social reformer, and religious mystic, born 28th August (o.s.) 1828, at Yásnaya Poliana in the government of Tula. He was educated privately at Moscow, and on the family estate till 1843-46, when he studied at Kazan University; in 1851 he joined the army of the Caucasus on the Terek, was attached to the staff of Prince Gortschakoff in Turkey in the first stage of the Crimean war, and was at the storming of Sebastopol by the allies in 1855. He now retired from the army, and, already famous as a poet and novelist, spent a short time in the most brilliant literary and social circles of St Petersburg. He then travelled in Germany and Italy; in 1862 he married, and since then has lived on his estates near Moscow amongst the peasantry.
It was during his residence in the Caucasus that he wrote Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Memoirs of Prince Nekludoff, and The Cossacks. After the Crimean war he wrote three sketches of Sebastopol; during his foreign sojourn, The Snow Storm, and the Two Hussars; next came Family Happiness, The Three Deaths, and Polikushka. The first of his two great works, War and Peace (1865-68), gives a marvellously vivid picture of the Napoleonic campaigns against Russia and the national defence; like many Russian novels, it is devoid of a regular novelistic plot, and is a kind of chronicle of two families and their friends, showing how their fates and characters were moulded by the events of that terrible time. The other great work, Anna Karenina (1875-78), is a melancholy tale of an ill-fated marriage, in which the inability to recognise the prosaic responsibilities of life leads to the suicide of the unhappy wife. It is, as Mr Arnold said, less a work of art than a piece of life; but what it loses in art it gains in reality. 'There is an abundant and admirable exhibition of knowledge of human nature, penetrating insight, fearless sincerity, wit, sarcasm, eloquence, style.'
Soon after this he intimated to the consternation of his friends that he had finally resolved to renounce the career of poet and artist to devote himself to studying the pressing problems of life, remedying its grievances, and becoming the 'friend of the unfriended poor.' Since that time he has not ceased to write, nor even to write novels, but all his work is written with directly didactic aim. Ivan Ilyitch, What People Live by, Where Love is there God is also, Two Pilgrims, The Dominion of Darkness, The Christianity of Christ, What I Believe, and Life—all insist on a mode of thought and ideal of life in which revolutionary discontent and religious confidence, Puritanism and Quietism, hyper-Christian self-devotion and an almost Buddhist resignation, deep insight and morbid asceticism are strangely combined and commended by the author's literary power, transparent sincerity, and self-denying tenderness for all the weary, heavy-laden, and oppressed. True religion (not dogmatic orthodoxy) is for him the most valuable element in life, and, though rare in the cultivated, is common if not ineradicable in the working poor, in the people. His conception of Christ's Christianity is summed up in six canons: Do not war; do not judge; do not commit fornication; do not swear; do not give way to anger; do not oppose with force the evil-doer—this last carried to the point of not interfering by force to prevent a murder. The Kreutzer Sonata (1890) finds the trail of the serpent—carnal passion and baseness—not merely in most existing social conditions, but in art as now practised, and even in what for others are the sanctities of family life. Turgeneff and Tolstoi, with many points of sympathy, never could agree, and had more than once a bitter quarrel; but on his deathbed Turgeneff sent a loving message to 'Leo Nikolaievitch' beseeching him to return to literature. Tolstoi would have wholly dispossessed himself of his property to live as a peasant; but his wife refused to see her children exposed to hardship, and Tolstoi made over his estates to her and them. Of his family, only two daughters (out of eight children) sympathise with him. He lives as poorly as a peasant, labours at mowing or sawing wood for any neighbour who asks him, and in his wife's house lives as a guest. In time of famine he is indefatigably self-denying in ministering to the sufferers. Recent works are The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), Master and Man (1894), Patriotism and Christianity (1896), Henry George's System (1897), What is Art? (1898), and The Christian Teaching (1899)—the latter published simultaneously in Russian, German, French, and English newspapers. The keynote of his revolutionary doctrine of art is, that only that art is good which moves the masses, and to good ends; what is written for the select can only be bad art.
See Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (2d series, 1888); De Vogüé, Le Roman Russe (1888); C. E. Turner, Count Tolstoi (1888); Loewenfeld, Leo Tolstoi (Berlin, 1892); C. A. Behrs, Recollections of Tolstoy (trans. 1893); G. H. Perris, Leo Tolstoi, the Grand Mujik (1898).