Tolstoy: The Supreme Genius

D. V. S. R. M U R T Y
Government Arts & Science College, Rajahmundry

Count Leo Tolstoy Nikolayevich is a literary genius. He is commended and “habitually read” all over the world. The War and Peace is his magnum opus, and Anna Karenina, his master­piece. His world-wide popularity and greatness mainly rests on the two novels. The War and Peace is “a picture of life” which extends over time and space. Anna Karenina is “a work of art. We are to take it as a piece of life.....The author saw it as happening so. What his novel in this way loses in art it gains in reality.” Tolstoy is a realist, and his two novels are the highest watermark in the tradition of the modern realistic novel. He is a great artist too, for he can change his personal experiences into emotions of our own as everything is seen through the lives of his living characters. War and Peace and Anna Karenina place him among the top novelists and artists.

His life

Count Leo Tolstoy was born on Sept. 9, 1828. at Yasnaya Polyana. His father was Count Nicholas Ilyich, and his mother, Princess Marie Volkonsky. Leo was their last but one child. He lost his mother when he was four years old, and his father at the age of ten. He was brought up by his elderly female relatives. His early education was under French tutors, and so he was more French in his outlook than Russian. He spent his boyhood in the countryside, and it left vivid impressions on his mind: His calm, happy life of the country was, perhaps, responsible for his apprecia­tion of Rousseau, when he was a student of Kazan University. He matriculated in 1844 from the university, but his academic interest slowly waned under his love of pleasant society. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana to cultivate his lands. Soon he lost interest in that life and left for Moscow where he started writing his diary in 1847. It was a landmark in his life, for his literary career grew out of his diary. He began to introspect and realise the futility of his pleasure-loving life. In 1851 he enlisted himself as a junker, and received his commission in 1854. He retired from the army in 1857 after participating in the war against Turks. Then he visited many European countries, and turned sick with the Western civilization. He settled at Yasnaya Polyana. After an abortive romance with Valaria Arseniev, he married Sophie Behrs in 1861. He had a happy conjugal life, and became affluent also. His literary genius blossomed fully in the congenial atmosphere of his home and countryside.

His literary work

Tolstoy is “the supreme genius among the novelists.” His literary career started when he was a junker. His first literary attempt, The Story of Yesterday (1851) is reflective as it sums up his feelings and reactions during a day. His next work, Childhood (1852) is a story, and it was immediately published in a literary review.

Rousseau influenced his literary work later. So Tolstoy glorified natural man in The Cossacks (1854). Two Hussars (1856), Lucrene(1857), Three Deaths (1859) and Kholstomer(1861) are Rousseauan in their themes. A reflecting character represents Tolstoy in them, and they contain satire on the life of the upper classes.

At this time he developed a philosophy of his own based on Rousseau’s teachings, and therefore believed that “one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one’s family.” It is to live happily according to the laws of natural life seeking guidance from nature. Man shall not try to be wiser than nature, and so his happiness lies in remaining nature-wise. The War and Peace and Anna Karenina highlight his philosophy of nature-wise mankind.

            The War and Peace is “a great and brilliant novel, a well-­known novel, and at the same time a large and crowded and unmangeable novel.” Its theme is war, but it is a ground against which “a succession of phases in the lives of certain generations” are depicted. It is “a novel of ample scope, covering wide spaces and many years, long and populous and eventful.” The novel extends over time and space, and it is said that it is the story of a nation like the Aeneidand a story of certain men like the Iliad.

            The War and Peace is the story of Russia at war. Tolstoy started writing it in 1864 and completed in 1869. Russia clashed with France under Napoleon in 1812. The French army marched under the command of Bonaparte, and his Grand Army was a hundred thousand strong. The Tsar, Alexander, was at the head of the Russian army, and it contained thirty-five thousand men only. Murat, the French general, and Kutusov, the Russian general, figure prominently in the novel. Tolstoy presented an impressive picture of “the two hugely blundering masses, Europe and Russia, ponderously colliding at the apparent dictation of a few limited brains.”

The Russian troops retreated to the lower ground about Danube as they were weak and exhausted. On 1st September 1812 French entered Moscow. Alexander was miserable, and he “sat under an apple tree and burying his face in his hands he wept.” Russians were forcibly sent out of Moscow, and then they set fire to it. The burning of Moscow is the climax of the novel. Napoleon entered the city with all fanfare, and awaited the surrender of Russia eagerly, but it did not take place. Then the Russian winter stepped in. The French soldiers. were unable to bear it. The Grand Army began to flee. Napoleon galloped off alone. Thus the Russian winter won the battle against Napoleon. Napoleon is a representative of those people who do not belong to the nature-wise mankind.

            The War and Peace is “an idyll of the Russian landed gentry.” It is the important story in the novel as it “emphasises the waxing and waning of a generation.” There is march of life over time and space. The novel is “essentially the story of five families.” The three brilliant families Rostovs, Bolkonskies and Besukovs play an important role. Numerous other characters from emperors to peasants too crowd the pages.

Women characters dominate in War and Peace. Natasha is at the centre, for she is “the embodiment of its philosophy, the quintessence of spontaneous, nature-wise makind.” She is the “delightful girl of her time and of all time,” and is involved in love affairs. She is so beautiful that everyone loves her, and she too loves everyone dearly. She loves Prince Andre first, but he dies being wounded in the battlefield. After the war she marries Peter, and lives for herself and for her family. . Nicholas, Sonya, Helen, Princess Mary, Peter and Prince Andre are well-drawn characters. War and Peace is “a panoramic vision of people and places, he makes it an image of beauty and truth that is final, complete and unqualified.”

            Anna Karenina (1873) is a dramatic novel with the gripping story of woman’s moral fall and her suicide. The novel appeared in installments from 1875 to 1877. Tolstoy begins it with a pregnant statement, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way:” The novel is a superb analysis of family lives, above all, it is “a powerful study of an unhappy woman.”

Anna is a beautiful woman, and people are crazy of her. Princess Myaky cryptically says, “How can she help it if they’re in love with her, and follow her about like shadows?” Even Anna is conscious of the machinations of people and observes, “I often wonder why people are in league to spoil me. What have I done, and what could I do?” She runs away from Vornsky to her cosy family life, but he follows her and succeeds in seducing her. Then love springs up in her heart for him, and turns indifferent to the exhortations of her husband. She goes away with Vornsky and lives with him like his wife braying insults and humiliations. Vornsky loves her truly, and tries to commit suicide when he was rejected by Anna on her sick-bed. They are lovers of a different kind altogether. She becomes angry with Vornsky, and falls under a running train and dies to punish Vornsky. Anna is modern, and she heralds the birth of modern women whose sex values are, different. Anna Karenina is a page from life with aesthetic and psychological overtones. She is a warning to all women who try to be wiser than nature and who do not live for their families.

Tolstoyism

Tolstoy renounced the church, and found his philosophy in non-resistance. To him the whole message of Christ is in the words, “that ye resist not evil.” The philosophy which is founded on non-resistance, is known as Tolstoyism. He pleaded for a simple life which is free from greed, lust, hate and selfishness, and lived simple life dressing himself as a peasant. He taught austerity to people and abstained from intoxicants and tobacco, and was a, vegetarian. He did much manual work like boot-making also, andgave his property to a trust, and died on November 8, 1910.

Tolstoy recognised the class war, and noticed the corrupt and artificial civilization built up by the rich. He declared that such a civilization had a demoralising effect on the poor who were kept in bondage and who still preserved their good nature. His disgust with corruption in every walk of life was manifest in War and Peace, Peter decried corruption and prophesised a revolution as everything was rotten. Indeed Tolstoy was prophetic in his utterance. But he was against revolution, for it would involve violence. Tohim all forms of violence were wicked, and so he denounced, all revolu­tionary activity. He exhorted people to avoid revolutions by practising love and compassion, and pointed out that social order would become better when all men learned to love one another. He preached love and compassion to all living beings, and such a universal love and compassion alone can save the world from a future holocaust. Tolstoy’s life and philosophy can be a panacea for the ills of the present-day India also, and the homage the world can pay to him is to practise love and com­passion, which he highlighted in his work, for a better and happier world.