In the late 12th century, although Russian literature produced the epic masterpiece "Igor's Expedition", its modern literature did not appear until the 18th century. By the 19th century, however, it suddenly ushered in a golden age: with Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol as the forerunners, all at once there were world-renowned poets, novelists, and playwrights such as Herzen, Goncharov, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Dointoevsky, Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Sherinde, Lev Tolstoy, Chekov, Androlenko. Among the stars of this series, the most brilliant should be Lev Tolstoy.
Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into a prominent aristocrat in the province of Tula, a hereditary earl. In 1844, he went to kazan University to study, dropped out of school, and returned to his estate. In 1851 he grew tired of social life and went to the Caucasus to join the army. After 1854, he participated in the Crimean War and voluntarily transferred to the Black Sea fortress of Sevastopol, serving as an artillery company commander in the most dangerous fourth bunker, and did not leave with tears until the castle fell.
He began writing in the Caucasus Army, publishing novels in the progressive journal Modern Man in Petersburg. When he arrived in Petersburg in 1855, he was already a well-known new writer in the literary world. He was retired in 1856. The following year he traveled to Western Europe. The short story "Lucerne", written at the time, expressed his dissatisfaction and disappointment with capitalist civilization.
In his youth, he felt uneasy about his conscience because he had taken possession of a large number of serfs and lived a life of luxury. When he returned home from university, he tried to improve the lives of the peasants, and in 1857 he drew up a plan to liberate the peasants, but without success. At that time, Russia was fiercely debating the question of how to liberate the peasantry. He was very conflicted; he sympathized with the peasantry, hated serfdom, and believed that the land should belong to the nobility; he saw that the reform of serfdom carried out by the Tsar was hypocritical, but he opposed the revolutionary abolition of serfdom. He was deeply distressed. In order to repay the people, he opened more than 20 schools for peasant children and worked as a teacher himself. He also runs an educational magazine, studies the education system, and travels abroad for this purpose. In the reform of serfdom at that time, he served as a "mediator" and often sided with the peasants. These activities aroused the suspicion of the Tsarist government, and his estate was often searched by the gendarmerie.
After marrying Sophia, the daughter of the imperial physician Beres, in the autumn of 1862, he spent six years writing a long book, War and Peace. At that time, he was already a great writer, and honor and wealth kept pouring in from him, and his wife, children, relatives and friends surrounded him warmly. But all this made him feel more and more condemned by his conscience. He doubts the purpose and meaning of survival and wonders what to do? These ideas were reflected in his tome anna karenina, which he wrote at the time. Around 1880, under the influence of the situation of the Russian Revolution, his world outlook underwent a radical change and changed to the position of the patriarchal peasant.
Since then, he has lived a simple life, often ploughing the land, sewing shoes, helping farmers build houses, and even fasting and vegetarian. On the one hand, he wrote a fierce criticism of private land ownership, tsarist autocracy, courts, and official churches; on the other hand, he opposed violent revolution, preached self-cultivation, and sought a way to resolve social contradictions from religion and ethics. His later novel Resurrection epitomizes this contradiction of thought.
He had long wanted to abandon aristocratic life. One early November 1910 morning, he ran away from home in secret, fell ill on the way, and died at a small station.
Lenin highly admired Tolstoy, saying that his work profoundly reflected the drastically changing Russian society of the second half of the 19th century, calling him the greatest writer in Europe at that time, while Lenin ruthlessly criticized his erroneous ideas. Lenin pointed out that Tolstoy's ideological contradictions were a reflection of the ideological contradictions of the russian patriarchal peasants at that time.
Tolstoy's works are many, here is a few of his masterpieces of the period.
The early novels "Childhood", "Adolescence" and "Youth" are autobiographical trilogies, writing about the spiritual growth process of an aristocratic youth, with meticulous psychological analysis: the war novel "The Story of Sevastopol" describes the heroic battles of soldiers based on personal experience, celebrating their simple and tragic patriotic spirit. Works from this period also include "Morning of a Landlord" and "Cossack".
Marking the maturity of his creation are two world famous books written in middle age. War and Peace (1863-1869) is primarily about the Russian people's Patriotic War against Napoleon in 1812. The drunken dreams of the court nobles in the novel are in stark contrast to the boldness and grandeur of ordinary soldiers. These ordinary people are the real protagonists of the novel. The book focuses on the Rostov and Balkonsky families, idealized manor house aristocrats. They were generous and patriotic. Duke Andrei of the Baulkansky family and another nobleman, Pierre Bezukhov, are central characters in the novel. Dissatisfied with high-society life, they explore the true meaning of life and happiness, hoping to be close to the people. Later, André died of wounds in the war, and Pierre became an aristocratic revolutionary. Anna Karenina (1873-1877) reflects the rise of capitalism in the 1860s after the reform of serfdom and the "turning everything upside down" Russian society. There are two parallel threads in the book: Anna and Levin. When Anna was young, she was married by her aunt to the grand bureaucrat Kareshou. She is beautiful, innocent, and has a rich spiritual world. She could not stand her husband's selfish hypocrisy, "despicable and dirty", pursued true love, and fell in love with the aristocratic young Vronsky. Anna's thoughts are contradictory: she hates her husband and feels sorry for him: she intends to divorce and is reluctant to leave her children; she does not want to be in league with women in the social world, but she cannot leave this circle. In addition, she herself was born into a large aristocracy and lacked real ideals, so that she fell into selfish love, could not extricate herself, and finally committed suicide. Levin was also a nobleman. He saw with sorrow the decline of the landlord economy, hated the emerging bourgeoisie, and fantasized about seeking a social outlet from the cooperation between the landlords and the peasants. After the utopia was shattered, he deeply felt that life was meaningless and pessimistic and disappointed. In the end, despite the spiritual comfort of family happiness and the beliefs of the patriarchal peasants, they actually still linger at a crossroads. This is exactly the state of mind on the eve of The Transformation of Tolstoy's Worldview.
His late works after the shift in his worldview were multifaceted: Folk Affairs, the plays The Dark Forces and The Fruits of Education, the short stories The Death of Ivan Ilyich, After the Prom, and Haji Murat, among others; and numerous expository political discourses. The representative work is the long "Resurrection". The protagonist, the aristocratic young Nekhlyudov, seduces the peasant girl Maslova, causing her to become a prostitute. She was later falsely accused of making money and murdering, and met him in court as a juror. Deeply repentant, he followed her to exile in order to atone for his sins, willing to marry her, but she refused out of love for him. The novels have profound exposés and critiques of the nobility, private ownership of land, the state, the courts, and the church, but they also highlight reactionary preaching that does not resist evil with violence. This is the expression of the contradictions in Tolstoy's thought.
Tolstoy was a great realist writer. He works on the huge picture of social life that depicts a wide range of all-encompassing pictures, is good at shaping real and colorful characters, and is good at navigating the structure of novels with thousands of clues. He believed that art should "benefit society or humanity" and opposed decadent literature and art for "parasites to relax and relieve boredom".
Gorky admired Tolstoy, saying that Shakespeare, Balzac and he were "three monuments that man has built for himself."