Tolstoy

Today is the birthday of Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, better known as Leo Tolstoy (1828) (books by this author), the Russian novelist responsible for two of the world's most enduring novels, War and Peace(1869) and Anna Karenina (1877).

Tolstoy was born in Tula, about 120 miles south of Moscow. His family was wealthy and his childhood was idyllic: he went swimming and sledding, and indulged his love for reading in his father's extensive library. He even stitched together an 18-page booklet titled "Grandfather's Tales," in which he wrote down some of the more memorable stories his grandfather had told him. Tolstoy's parents died while he was still young, and he was raised by relatives. At Kazan University (1844), he learned several languages, but failed to finish. One instructor said he was "both unable and unwilling to learn."

He spent several years writing in a diary, drinking, gambling, racking up huge debts, and visiting brothels until his brother convinced him to join the army. His experiences in the war profoundly affected his spiritual views and sowed the seeds for his later conversion to pacifism. His ideas on nonviolence became strong influences on Mohandas Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Tolstoy already had three acclaimed novels under his belt, Childhood (1852),Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1856), by the time he married Sophia Andreyevna. She was 18 to his 34, and in the spirit of full disclosure, he presented her with his diaries a week before their marriage. She read, with horror, of his many sexual exploits with serfs, including one that resulted in a son. Nevertheless, she married him.

He vowed that he "would not have any women in our village, except for rare chances, which I would neither seek nor prevent." Sophia found his estate in disarray: beds without blankets, dinnerware old and cracked, rooms in disrepair. She bore him 13 children, breastfeeding each one at his insistence, even though it caused her unbearable physical pain. She began to keep her own diary. She wrote, "His heart is so icy."

It took Tolstoy six years to complete War and Peace (1869). Sophia painstakingly rewrote each draft, nine revisions in all. He even made her a special tray so that she could write while sitting up in bed, recovering from puerperal fever. At almost 1,400 pages, it is one of the longest books ever written.

In his diary, he wrote: "I feel that she is depressed, but I'm more depressed still, and I can't say anything to her - there's nothing to say. I'm just cold, and I clutch at any work with ardor."

She wrote: "I am afraid to talk to him or look at him. I am sure he must suddenly have realized just how vile and pathetic I am."

Sophia began a yearslong ritual of copying out Tolstoy's diaries so that she could better understand him. She hid hers, but he continually found and read them. He left her after 48 years, escaping with their youngest daughter on a train, after writing a secret will renouncing his worldly possessions. He died a week later at the station master's home, with Sophia at the door, begging to be let in.

Anna Karenina, which many consider a finer novel than War and Peace, begins, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."