The writer is constantly haunted by the thought of the tragic situation of Russia: “Crowded Siberia, prisons, war, gallows, poverty of the people, blasphemy, greed and cruelty of the authorities...” He perceives the plight of the people as his personal misfortune, which cannot be forgotten for a moment. S.A. Tolstaya writes in her diary: “... suffering about misfortunes, injustice of people, about their poverty, about prisoners in prisons, about the anger of people, about oppression - all this affects his impressionable soul and burns his existence.” Continuing the work begun by “War and Peace,” the writer delves into the study of Russia’s past in order to find the origins and explanation of the present.
Tolstoy resumes work on a novel about the era of Peter the Great, interrupted by the writing of Anna Karenina. This work again returns him to the theme of Decembrism, which led the writer to “War and Peace” in the 60s. At the end of the 70s, both plans merged into one - truly colossal: Tolstoy conceived an epic that was supposed to cover an entire century, from the time of Peter to the Decembrist uprising. This idea remained in sketches. The writer's historical research deepened his interest in folk life. He critically looks at the works of scientists who reduced the history of Russia to the history of reigns and conquests, and comes to the conclusion that the main character of history is the people. Tolstoy studies the situation of the working masses in contemporary Russia and behaves not as an outside observer, but as a defender of the oppressed: he organizes assistance to starving peasants, visits courts and prisons, standing up for the innocently convicted.
The writer's participation in the life of the people was also manifested in his teaching activities. She became especially active in the 70s. Tolstoy, in his words, wants education for the people in order to save the drowning Pushkins and Lomonosovs, who “teem in every school.” In the early 80s, Tolstoy participated in the All-Russian Population Census. He takes on work in the so-called “Rzhanov Fortress” - a Moscow den of “the worst poverty and debauchery.” The “dregs of society” living here, in the eyes of the writer, are the same people as everyone else. Tolstoy wants to help them “get back on their feet.” It seems to him that it is possible to arouse society’s sympathy for these unfortunates, that it is possible to achieve “loving communication” between the rich and the poor, and the whole point is only for the rich to understand the need to live “like God.”
But at every step, Tolstoy sees something different: the ruling classes commit any crimes in order to maintain their power, their wealth. This is how Tolstoy pictured Moscow, where he moved with his family in 1881: “Stink, stones, luxury, poverty. Debauchery. The villains who robbed the people gathered, recruited soldiers and judges to guard their orgy, and feasted.” Tolstoy perceives all this horror so acutely that his own material well-being begins to seem unacceptable to him.
He abandons his usual living conditions and engages in physical labor: chopping wood, carrying water. “As soon as you enter workers’ housing, your soul blossoms,” Tolstoy writes in his diary. And at home he finds no place for himself. "Boring. Hard. Idleness. Fat... hard, hard. There is no light. Death beckons more often.”
Entries of this kind now fill his diaries. More and more often, Tolstoy speaks of the inevitability of a “workers’ revolution with the horrors of destruction and murder.” He considers the revolution to be retribution for the oppression of the people and the atrocities of the masters, but does not believe that it is a saving solution for Russia. Where is the salvation? This question becomes more and more painful for the writer. It seems to him that evil and violence cannot be eradicated through violence, that only the unity of people in the spirit of the covenants of ancient Christianity can save Russia and humanity. He proclaims the principle of “non-resistance to evil through violence.”
“...I now have one desire in life,” writes Tolstoy, “and this is not to upset anyone, not to offend anyone, not to do anything unpleasant to anyone—the executioner, the moneylender—but to try to love them.” At the same time, the writer sees that executioners and moneylenders are intractable to preaching love. “The need for reproof is becoming stronger and stronger,” Tolstoy admits. And he furiously and angrily denounces the inhumanity of the government, the hypocrisy of the church, the idleness and debauchery of the ruling classes.
In the early 80s, a long-overdue change in Tolstoy’s worldview was completed. In his “Confession” (1879-1882) Tolstoy writes: “I renounced the life of our circle.” The writer condemns all his previous activities and even participation in the defense of Sevastopol. All this now seems to him to be a manifestation of vanity, pride, and greed, which are characteristic of “gentlemen.” Tolstoy speaks of his desire to live the life of the working people, to believe in them by faith. He thinks that for this you need to “renounce all the pleasures of life, work, humble yourself, endure and be merciful.”
The writer’s works express the indignation and protest of the broad masses suffering from economic and political lawlessness. In the article “L. N. Tolstoy and the modern labor movement" (1910) V.I. Lenin says: “By birth and upbringing, Tolstoy belonged to the highest landowner nobility in Russia - he broke with all the usual views of this environment and, in his last works, attacked passionate criticism of all modern state, church, social, economic orders based on the enslavement of the masses, on their poverty, on the ruin of peasants and small owners in general, on violence and hypocrisy, which permeate all modern life from top to bottom.” Tolstoy's ideological quest did not stop until the last day of his life.
But no matter how his views further develop, their basis remains the defense of the interests of the many millions of peasant masses. And when the first revolutionary storm was raging in Russia, Tolstoy wrote: “In this entire revolution I hold the rank of ... lawyer of the 100 million agricultural people” (1905). The worldview of Tolstoy, who became, according to Lenin, the first “peasant in literature,” was expressed in many of his works written in the 80-90s and 900s: in stories, plays, articles, in the last of his novels - "Resurrection".
“No matter how hard people tried, having gathered several hundred thousand in one small place, to disfigure the land on which they huddled, no matter how they stoned the ground so that nothing would grow on it, no matter how they cleared away all the growing grass, no matter how they smoked coal and oil, no matter how they trimmed the trees and drove out all the animals and birds, spring was spring even in the city.
The sun warmed, the grass, coming to life, grew and turned green everywhere it was not scraped off, not only on the lawns of the boulevards, but also between the slabs of stones, and birches, poplars, bird cherry blossomed their sticky and odorous leaves, lindens inflated their bursting buds; Jackdaws, sparrows and pigeons were already happily preparing their nests in spring, and flies were buzzing near the walls, warmed by the sun.
The plants, birds, insects, and children were cheerful. But people - big, grown people - did not stop deceiving and torturing themselves and each other. People believed that what was sacred and important was not this spring morning, not this beauty of God’s world, given for the good of all beings - a beauty conducive to peace, harmony and love, but what was sacred and important was what they themselves invented in order to rule over each other. friend."
This is how L. N. Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” begins. In complex sentences, extended periods, typical of Tolstoy’s manner, different aspects of life are illuminated, opposed to each other. Read these lines again and tell me what it is: a description of a spring morning in the city or the author’s thoughts about nature and society? A solemn hymn to the joys of a simple, natural life or an angry denunciation of people who do not live as they should?.. Everything merged here: the epic and lyrical principles, description and sermon, narration of events and expression of the author’s feelings. This fusion is characteristic of the entire work.
The image of two human destinies forms its basis. Prince Nekhlyudov, being a juror in court, recognizes the defendant accused of murder as the woman whom he seduced and abandoned many years ago. Deceived and insulted by him, Katyusha Maslova ends up in a brothel and, having lost faith in people, in truth, in goodness and justice, finds herself on the verge of spiritual death. In other ways - leading a luxurious and depraved life, forgetting about truth and goodness - Nekhlyudov also goes to the final moral decline. The meeting of these people saves them both from death and contributes to the resurrection of the truly human principle in their souls. Katyusha is innocently convicted. Nekhlyudov is trying to alleviate her plight.
At first Katyusha is hostile towards him. She does not want and cannot forgive the person who ruined her; she believes that the motives prompting Nekhlyudov to care about her fate are selfish. “You enjoyed me in this life, but you want to be saved by me in the next world!” - she throws angry words into Nekhlyudov’s face. But as the soul is resurrected, the former feeling of love is also revived. And Nekhlyudov changes before Katyusha’s eyes. He follows her to Siberia and wants to marry her. But she refuses this marriage, because she is afraid that he, not loving her, only out of a sense of duty decides to connect his fate with the convict. Katyusha finds a friend - revolutionary Simonson. The renewal of the human soul is shown as a natural and beautiful process, similar to the revival of spring nature. Resurrected love for Nekhlyudov, communication with simple, honest and kind people - all this helps Katyusha return to the pure life that she lived in her youth. She again finds faith in man, in truth, in goodness. Gradually learning the life of the oppressed, the disadvantaged, he begins to distinguish good from evil and the Nekhluds. In the first chapters of the novel, the author often paints his image in satirical tones.
But as the hero of “Resurrection” moves away from the privileged circle, the author’s voice and his voice come closer, and Nekhlyudov’s mouth increasingly contains accusatory speeches. This is how the main characters of the novel go from moral decline to spiritual rebirth. Not a single work of Tolstoy has revealed the very essence of the lawlessness, lies and meanness of class society with such merciless force, with such anger and pain, with such irreconcilable hatred. Tolstoy paints a soulless, blind bureaucratic machine that crushes living people.
Here is one of the “engines” of this machine - the old general Baron Kriegsmut. As a result of the execution of his orders, given “in the name of the sovereign emperor,” political prisoners are dying. Their death does not touch the general’s conscience, since the person in him died long ago. “Nekhlyudov listened to his hoarse old voice, looked at these ossified limbs, at the extinct eyes from under gray eyebrows... at this white cross, which this man was proud of, especially because he received it for an exceptionally cruel and multi-spirited murder, and understood that It’s useless to object, to explain to him the meaning of his words.” Exposing the crime of his contemporary society, Tolstoy often turns to one expressive detail, which, repeated many times, attracts the reader’s attention to the very essence of the social phenomenon. This is the image of the “bloodless child in a rag-bag” that Nekhlyudov sees in the village. “This child never ceased to smile strangely with all his senile face and kept moving his tensely crooked thumbs.
A thoughtful artist also strives to understand those who declared open war on a vicious society, who go to hard labor for their beliefs. The author ranks revolutionaries among the category of people who “stood morally above the average level of society” and calls them the best people. The revolutionaries endear Nekhlyudov, and according to Katyusha, “she not only did not know such wonderful people, but could not even imagine.” “She very easily and without effort understood the motives that guided these people, and, as a person of the people, she fully sympathized with them. She realized that these people were going for the people, against the masters; and the fact that these people themselves were gentlemen and sacrificed their advantages, freedom and lives for the people, made her especially appreciate these people and admire them.”
In the assessment of the revolutionaries given from Katyusha’s point of view, it is not difficult to discern the author’s attitude towards them. The images of Maria Pavlovna, Kryltsov, Simonson are charming. The only exception is Novodvorov, who claims to be a leader, treats the people with contempt and is confident in his infallibility. This man brought into the revolutionary environment that reverence for form, for dead dogmas to the detriment of the interests of living people, which reigned in bureaucratic circles. But it is not Novodvorov who determines the moral character of revolutionaries. Despite deep ideological differences with them, Tolstoy could not help but appreciate their moral values.
However, Tolstoy still rejects the very principle of the violent overthrow of a rotten social system. “Resurrection” reflected not only the strength of the great realist, but also the tragic contradictions of his passionate quest. At the end of the novel, Nekhlyudov comes to a bitter conclusion: “All that terrible evil that he saw and learned during this time... all this evil... triumphed, reigned, and there was no possibility of not only defeating it, but even understanding how to defeat it.” . The conclusion that Nekhlyudov unexpectedly finds for the reader and for himself after everything he has seen and experienced does not follow from those pictures of life that passed before his eyes. This solution was suggested by the book that ended up in Nekhlyudov’s hands—the Gospel.
He comes to the conviction that “the only and undoubted means of salvation from the terrible evil from which people suffer is to always recognize oneself as guilty before God and therefore incapable of either punishing or correcting other people.” The answer to the question of how to destroy all the horror that Nekhlyudov saw turns out to be simple: “Forgive always, everyone, forgive an infinite number of times, because there are no people who themselves are not guilty...” Who to forgive? Baron Kriegsmuth? Are the victims as guilty as the executioners? And has humility ever saved the oppressed? “Make the whole world listen!”
He said about Tolstoy: “He walked around Russia for 60 years, looked everywhere; to the village, to the village school, to the Vyazemsky Lavra and abroad, to prisons, prisons, to ministerial offices, to the governors' offices, to huts, to inns and to the living rooms of aristocratic ladies. For 60 years a stern and truthful voice sounded, denouncing everyone and everything; he told us about almost as much as the rest of our literature... Tolstoy is deeply national, he embodies in his soul with amazing completeness all the features of the complex Russian psyche... Tolstoy is a whole world. A deeply truthful man, he is also valuable to us because his works of art, written with terrible, almost miraculous power - all his novels and stories - fundamentally deny his religious philosophy... This man did a truly enormous job: he gave a summary of what he had experienced for a whole century, and gave it with amazing truthfulness, strength and beauty. Without knowing Tolstoy, one cannot consider oneself to know one’s country, one cannot consider oneself a cultured person.”
Life path and creative biography (with a summary of what was previously studied). Spiritual quest of the writer. Epic novel "War and Peace".
Stages of life and ideological and creative development of L. Tolstoy.
1. 1828-1849 Childhood, adolescence. Youth: the origins of personality.
2. 1849-1851 Yasnaya Polyana: the experience of independent living.
3. 1851-1855 Military service. On the way to "War and Peace".
4. 1860-1870 Writer, public figure, teacher.
5. 1880-1890 “I renounced the life of our circle.”
6. 1900-1910 People and meetings. Exodus.
The best works of Tolstoy.
1. "War and Peace" (1864-1869)
2. “Anna Karenina” (1870-1877)
3. "The Power of Darkness" (1866)
4. “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889-1889)
5. "Resurrection" (1889-1899)
6. “Hadji - Murat” (1896-1905)
7. Comedy “The Fruits of Enlightenment” (1900)
8. Journalistic articles “I Can’t Be Silent”, “Thou Shalt Not Kill and Others” (1908)
9. “After the Ball” (1903)
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy left a great artistic legacy, which is included in the treasury of not only Russian, but also world literature. A brilliant artist, a passionate moralist, he, perhaps, like no other Russian writer, became the conscience of the nation. Whatever aspects of life this outstanding man touched on in his works, he painted with unprecedented depth, human wisdom and simplicity. But Tolstoy went down in the history of spiritual life not only as a great artist, but also as a unique thinker. The 19th century, neither in Russia nor in Europe, knew another such powerful, passionate and ardent “seeker of truth.” And this greatness of Tolstoy’s personality was reflected both in his thoughts and in his entire life. Childhood, adolescence, youth
In the Yasnaya Polyana estate, located fourteen miles from the ancient Russian city of Tula, on August 28 (September 11), 1828, the brilliant Russian writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born.
The Tolstoy family belonged to the highest aristocratic nobility of Russia. Tolstoy's father, Count Nikolai Ilyich, is a dreamy young man, the only son of his parents, against the wishes of his relatives, at the age of 17 he entered military service, and for a number of years he participated in many battles of the Patriotic War of 1812. Upon his retirement, he married and settled on his wife’s estate in Yasnaya Polyana, where he farmed. Tolstoy's mother, Maria Nikolaevna, is the only daughter of Prince N.S. Volkonsky, was an educated woman of her time. She spent most of her youth in Yasnaya Polyana on her father's estate. The couple lived happily: Nikolai Ilyich treated his wife with great respect and was devoted to her; Maria Nikolaevna felt sincere affection for her husband as the father of her children. And the Tolstoys gave birth to five of them: Nikolai, Dmitry, Sergei, Lev and Maria.
Maria Nikolaevna died shortly after the birth of her daughter Maria, when her youngest son Levushka was not even two years old. He did not remember her at all and, at the same time, in his soul he created a wonderful image of a mother who he loved all his life. “She seemed to me such a high, pure, spiritual being that often in the middle period of my life, during the struggle with the temptations that overwhelmed me, I prayed to her soul asking her to help me, and this prayer always helped me,” Tolstoy wrote already in mature age.
L.N.’s life was carefree and joyful. Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana during his childhood. The inquisitive boy eagerly absorbed impressions of the rich Yasnaya Polyana nature and the people around him. Lyovochka loved to read books as a child. He was fond of Pushkin's poems and Krylov's fables. Tolstoy retained his love for Pushkin throughout his life and called him his teacher.
Little Tolstoy was very sensitive. Lyovochka's childhood sorrows evoked in him, on the one hand, a feeling of tenderness, on the other, a desire to unravel the mysteries of life, and these aspirations remain in him for the rest of his life.
From Tolstoy's earliest childhood in Yasnaya Polyana, in addition to his family and friends, he was surrounded by courtyard servants and peasants. They had a great influence on Tolstoy; they brought him closer to the people, involuntarily forced him to think about the question of why life was so unfair that rich nobles owned land and serfs, they themselves lived in idle luxury, and serfs had to work for the nobles, live in poverty and always obey their gentlemen.
Nikolai Ilyich decided to move the children to Moscow, where there was more opportunity to give them an education. Tolstoy was nine years old when he first left Yasnaya Polyana. Later L.N. Tolstoy often had to travel by carriage from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow and back. The impressions from these trips were so strong and vivid that they were vividly reflected in “Childhood” and “Adolescence”.
Soon after the family moved to Moscow, the father dies. Less than a year after the death of Nikolai Ilyich, Countess Pelageya Nikolaevna died, having never been able to come to terms with the loss of her son. The Tolstoy children were left orphans. Guardianship was appointed over them. At first, their guardian was their closest relative - the kind and deeply religious Alexandra Ilyinichna Osten-Sacken; and after her death, which followed in 1841, another aunt, Pelageya Ilyinichna Yushkova, a woman, although narrow-minded, enjoyed great respect in the aristocratic circle, largely thanks to her husband Vladimir Ivanovich Yushkov. The Yushkovs lived in Kazan, where the children were sent. But the closest person to the Tolstoy children is Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya, a distant relative on their father’s side. She was a poor, rather attractive woman who had dearly loved Nikolai Ilyich all her life. “Her main feature was love, but no matter how much I wanted it to be different - love for one person - for my father,” Lev Nikolaevich wrote about her. Only starting from this center, her love spread to all people.” . T.A. Ergolskaya did not go to Kazan with the Tolstoy children.
In the spring of 1844, 16-year-old Tolstoy took an exam at Kazan University for the Arab-Turkish department of the Oriental Faculty, with the intention of becoming a diplomat. Dressed in an overcoat with beavers, white gloves and a cocked hat, Tolstoy appeared at Kazan University as a real gentleman. From this time his social life begins.
Tolstoy was captivated by the lush, noisy social life. Both bright childhood dreams and unclear dreams - everything drowned in this whirlpool of Kazan life. But the more he was among a noisy and idle society, the more and more often the young man Tolstoy remained lonely, and he increasingly disliked this way of life.
Tolstoy's religious ideas also collapsed at this time. “From the age of sixteen, I stopped going to prayer and, on my own impulse, stopped going to church and fasting,” he recalled in “Confession.” Social life tires him and does not satisfy him, he thinks more and more about the falseness of the lives of those around him, he begins to experience mental anxiety.
Having no inclination towards diplomacy, Tolstoy, a year after entering the university, decided to transfer to the Faculty of Law, believing that legal sciences were more useful for society.
With great interest, he listens at the university to lectures by Master of Civil Law D. Meyer, a supporter of Belinsky, a supporter of advanced ideas. Belinsky's ideas and his articles on literature penetrated the walls of Kazan University and exerted their beneficial influence on young people. Tolstoy read Russian fiction with enthusiasm; he liked Pushkin, Gogol, and from foreign literature - Goethe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In books, Tolstoy looks for answers to questions that concern him. Not limiting himself to reading a particular book, he keeps notes on what he read.
But legal sciences could not satisfy Tolstoy either. He is faced with new and new questions that he could not get an answer to at the university.
At the end of his stay at the university, Tolstoy moved from random entries in notebooks to systematic journaling. In his diaries, he sets out the rules of life, which he considers necessary to follow: “1) Whatever is assigned to be fulfilled, do it, no matter what. 2) Whatever you do, do it well. 3) Never consult a book if you forgot something, but try to remember it yourself.” Along with drawing up the rules of life, Tolstoy also thinks about the question of the purpose of human life. He defines the purpose of his life as follows: “...the conscious desire for the comprehensive development of everything that exists”
In 1847, while in his last year, Tolstoy left the university. The main thing that prompted him to do this, as he himself says, was the desire to devote himself to life in the village, the desire to do good and love it.
Upon Tolstoy's arrival in Yasnaya Polyana, the division of their father's inheritance took place between the brothers. 19-year-old Lev Nikolaevich, as the youngest of the brothers, inherited Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy, a young landowner, strives with all passion to improve his shaky economy. In the village, Tolstoy continues to write his diary. A characteristic feature of the writer’s diaries at this time is spontaneity, deep sincerity and truthfulness. In them he paid a lot of attention to introspection, castigated his idle life, his shortcomings. But life in the village still could not completely satisfy the writer and fill his interests. At the beginning of 1849, Tolstoy left for Moscow, and then to St. Petersburg, where he plunged headlong into the “careless” life of a secular young man “without service, without classes, without purpose.” He was especially attracted to the “process of exterminating money” at the card table. To put an end to this way of life, Tolstoy decides to leave for the Caucasus. And in April 1851 he left with his brother, officer Nikolai Nikolaevich, who was assigned there.
Caucasus. Sevastopol
L. Tolstoy's trip to the Caucasus was an impetus for the manifestation of the writer's creative powers, which had accumulated even earlier. Impressions from the rich Caucasian nature, from noisy villages, from brave and proud people did not prevent the writer from working hard on himself. He increasingly shows a desire for creativity. Now he does not part with his notebooks, writes down in them everything he sees in the hut, in the forest, on the street, rewrites and corrects what he has copied. Observations of the life and everyday life of the Cossacks formed the basis for one of Tolstoy's most poetic creations - the story "Cossacks".
In the Caucasus, Tolstoy wrote part of his trilogy - “Childhood”, “Adolescence”. In the trilogy there are characters whose prototypes were Tolstoy’s relatives, people close to his family, his friends and teachers, but at the center of it stands Nikolenka Irteniev - an unusually impressionable child, internally very mobile, prone to introspection, but at the same time able to observe the life around her. . These traits of Nikolenka are even more pronounced in his adolescence and youth. Tolstoy himself, in his memoirs written in old age, pointed out that “Childhood” reflected the events of the lives of his childhood friends and his own.
Simultaneously with work on the trilogy, Tolstoy was busy with a work that, in handwritten texts and diary entries, bore the title “The Novel of a Russian Landowner.” In it, Tolstoy intended to outline the “evil of Russian rule,” which he saw in the existence in Russia of unlimited tsarist power and serfdom. The novel, which Tolstoy worked on intermittently for about five years, was not completed because Tolstoy could not find a solution to the main question facing him - how to combine the interests of the peasants with the interests of the landowner. In 1856, a significant fragment of the novel was published, entitled "The Morning of the Landowner."
Tolstoy's direct participation in military operations in the Caucasus gave him material for stories on the theme of war and about military life. This was reflected mainly in the stories “The Raid” and “Cutting the Woods”. Tolstoy showed the war from a side from which it had not been depicted in literature until then. He is occupied not so much by the battle theme in itself, but by how people behave in a military situation, what properties of nature a person discovers in war.
The Caucasian period left a deep mark on Tolstoy’s life; he considered it one of the best periods of his life - it was a period of spiritual revival and literary growth of the writer.
Tolstoy moved from the Caucasus to Sevastopol. During the Crimean War, he, an artillery officer, fought on the famous 4th bastion, one of the most dangerous sections of the defense of Sevastopol. In these extreme conditions, Tolstoy showed his best side. He participated in all combat operations of his unit, skillfully commanded guns and was on battery duty more often than other officers. The officers respected him, and among the soldiers he enjoyed a reputation as a desperate brave man.
For his bravery, artillery second lieutenant Lev Tolstoy was awarded the Order of Anna and the medals “For the Defense of Sevastopol” and “In Memory of the War of 1853-1856.”
"Sevastopol Stories" is a further development of the work of the young writer. This is the next stage in Tolstoy's depiction of war. Here he was the first, in essence, to truthfully show the war “not in the correct, beautiful, brilliant formation, with music and drumming, with waving banners and prancing generals,” but “in its real expression - in blood, in suffering, in death.”
The combat situation in Sevastopol and closeness with the soldiers cause the writer to think a lot about his future life. He is no longer satisfied with his military career; he writes in his diary: “The military career is not mine, and the sooner I get out of it in order to fully indulge in the literary one, the better it will be.”
In his diaries for 1854, Tolstoy pays a lot of attention to introspection; either he talks about his lack of character, or about laziness, irritability, considering them important vices. He comes to the conclusion that the higher you try to show yourself to people, the lower you become in their opinion. Despite the love and attention that the writer enjoyed among his relatives and acquaintances, he experienced a feeling of loneliness in the Crimea, just as in the Caucasus.
Yasnaya Polyana school
Having achieved his resignation, in May 1856 Tolstoy returned again to his beloved Yasnaya Polyana. Here he is somehow sad, but pleased. But in order to broaden his horizons, to start a new life, which he thought about all the time, Tolstoy went abroad in January 1857. He tries to use his stay there to expand his knowledge. In Paris, Tolstoy met with Turgenev and Nekrasov. I met the French writer and traveler Prosper Merimee. Abroad, Tolstoy wrote the story “From the Notes of Prince L. Nekhlyudov. Lucerne” and began the story “Albert”. The plot of "Lucerne" and "Alberta" was based on events in which the author took personal part. Depicting the disastrous fate of a street singer ("Lucerne") and a drunken violinist who perished from the indifference of patrons of the arts ("Albert"), Tolstoy raised the question of the purpose of art, the bitter fate of its servants in a society where egoism, acquisitiveness, careerism reigns, and the idol is money bag.
In August 1857 he returned to Russia, to Yasnaya Polyana. Even as a twenty-year-old young man, Tolstoy was attracted to teaching; in 1849, he taught children of Yasnaya Polyana peasants. And ten years later, in 1859, he decided to return to her. In search of a way out of his restless, anxious state, in the very outbuilding where he studied music and reading, he opens a school. With curiosity and trepidation, the children came to the manor's estate for the first time to see their future teacher. But it was enough for Tolstoy to ask the children a few questions, tell them what they would do at school, and the fear was gone. The guys themselves began to ask questions, look at the classrooms and listened to the first conversation of the writer, now their teacher.
Tolstoy threw himself into his teaching work. And he felt the need to more widely understand the organization of public education, not only in Russia, but also in other countries. In July 1860, Tolstoy traveled abroad for the second time. The main purpose of the travels was, as he wrote to his brother Sergei Nikolaevich from Paris: “... to find out the current situation of schools abroad, so that no one in Russia dares to point out pedagogy to foreign lands, and to be on the level of everything that has been done in this area.” . (4, 47)
After the peasant reform (1861), endless disputes and misunderstandings occurred between peasants and landowners. Many landowners did not want to give up their rights to the peasants, some did not want to give them land, and such disputes were supposed to be resolved by mediators. Upon his arrival from abroad, Tolstoy was appointed peace mediator for the Krapivensky district of the Tula province. But the writer also had a second business - this was his school. As soon as he arrived from abroad, he immediately began teaching students, there were about 50 of them. At this time, he was already seeking recognition of his school and became a parish public teacher. Tolstoy was passionate about schoolwork. The fame of the Yasnaya Polyana school spread not only throughout the Tula province, they knew about it in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and even abroad. In addition to his Yasnaya Polyana school, Tolstoy then organized several schools in the surrounding villages. So, in October 1861, three schools were opened - Golovenkovskaya, Zhitovskaya and Lomintsevskaya, then in the area where Tolstoy was a peace intermediary, the number of schools reached twenty-one.
Family life. "War and Peace"
No matter how interested Tolstoy was in his school and mediation activities, he still could not drown out the artist-writer within himself; he was drawn more strongly than ever to create works of art. Tolstoy had an irresistible desire to talk in artistic images about Russian life, about what worries him, to express his sincere views, his ideas, his feelings, to talk about what he had lived and experienced during this time. He is collecting material for the novel “The Decembrists,” which he decided to write while abroad, after meeting the Decembrist S.G. Volkonsky, who had just returned from exile, wrote the story "Polikushka" and finished the story "Cossacks", on which he worked intermittently for about 10 years.
Despite the beginning of an upsurge in literary work, Tolstoy found it more and more difficult to live alone. In the summer of 1862 he felt especially lonely. “I have no friends, no! I am alone. I had friends when I served mammon, and not when I serve the truth.”
He is sad and melancholy, and more and more often he continues to travel to Moscow and visit there with the family of the famous court doctor Andrei Evstafievich Bers, who had three daughters - Lisa, Sonya and Tanya. Here Tolstoy experiences warmth and comfort. And he is irresistibly drawn to the Bersovs’ middle daughter, Sonya. He liked her for her simple disposition, her cordiality, her fun, and her lively mind. Sofya Andreevna brought great excitement and comfort to the life of Yasnaya Polyana. Now the writer has found peace of mind. He was happy with his life. All his worries and doubts seemed to disappear. Tolstoy's path in life became clearer. Surrounded by the attention of his wife, Tolstoy completely immerses himself in literary work. New images take him deep into the history of our homeland - to the fields of great battles of the Russian people. Tolstoy lives with his heroes and paints pictures of Russian social life during the Patriotic War of 1812.
In 1862, seven years passed after the fall of Sevastopol, Russia had not yet healed its wounds, the Russian people were still deeply worried about their defeat and the fall of Sevastopol. It was necessary to inspire the people to believe in themselves, in their strength, in their courage, to show an example of people’s strength, to awaken their national self-awareness, to show the spiritual beauty of the Russian people, their heroic struggle for their independence. All this was reflected in the immortal epic "War and Peace". Tolstoy began writing the novel War and Peace in 1863 and finished it in 1869. Before starting the novel “War and Peace,” Tolstoy studied letters, manuscripts, newspapers, books about the history of the Patriotic War of 1812, he was interested in the memories of his contemporaries, their stories about this time, he read the history of Alexander I and Napoleon, studied their relationships, their characters and their surroundings. And secluded in his office, Tolstoy drew images of the lovely Natasha Rostova, and the noble Andrei Bolkonsky, an independent and proud patriot, his father Vasily and the good-natured, honest Pierre Bezukhov and other heroes of the novel. Tolstoy's life during the period of his inspired work on the novel War and Peace passed more or less calmly. In the summer of 1863, the Tolstoy couple had their first child, Seryozha. A year later, daughter Tanya was born.
70s. "Anna Karenina". Spiritual crisis
After a long, intense work, Tolstoy finishes his brilliant epic - the novel War and Peace. It was possible to take a break from work, but the writer had new desires, new needs, and he writes: “The soul asked for something - I wanted something. What do I want?” - he asked himself a question. He himself was not clear about his desires, but he felt the need to change his life, he felt growing spiritual anxiety, a desire to find something that was not in the environment. In this search for the eternally new, all the brilliant, passionate, living nature of the writer is reflected. He wants to be reborn and be completely different.
He studies the dramas of Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe. I suddenly started learning Greek. I once again became passionate about working in the field of education. He was captivated by the idea of training teachers from the people, he tried to open a “University in bast shoes,” as Sofia Andreevna put it. But he was unable to do this due to lack of funds.
The books that children were taught from were boring and incomprehensible, and Tolstoy had the idea of writing a new “ABC” and reading books for schools. He writes many small children's stories, fables, fairy tales and at the same time creates a large story, “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” Tolstoy worked on it very carefully, especially on the language of the story, achieving its simplicity and clarity, so that it could pass “through the censorship of janitors, cab drivers, black cooks.”
"ABC" was not a great success. Tolstoy soon began creating large works of art.
Tolstoy is occupied with a new idea - to portray a type of married woman from high society, who has lost herself, pitiful, but not guilty. This image appeared to the writer back in 1870. This was the idea behind the novel Anna Karenina. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy is still the same great artist-psychologist, an extraordinary expert on the human soul, from whose eyes the slightest movement cannot escape. He showed us new human identities and plumbed new psychological depths. Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, Levin, Kitty, Stiva Oblonsky, his wife Dolly - all these images are wonderful artistic discoveries that only Tolstoy’s ever-growing talent could do. The novel Anna Karenina, according to Dostoevsky, is “perfection as a work of art, with which nothing similar in European literature in the present era can compare.”
After long and joyful years of life, the Tolstoy family suffered a severe grief. In 1873, the writer’s youngest son Petya died. In the summer of 1874, her beloved aunt Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya, who occupied a large place in the writer’s life, died.
Tolstoy finished his novel Anna Karenina at a time when more than ten years had passed after the abolition of serfdom and when the old order was rapidly changing in Russia, but new ones had not yet been established. When the landowner's land passed to the peasants, but they could not develop it, and therefore some of them left the land, went to the city to earn money, and only a small part of the peasants bought land from the bankrupt peasants. Tolstoy was haunted by thoughts about the fate of the peasants and the bankrupt landowner, about their relationship, and he painfully sought a way out of this historically created situation.
The writer continued to go for walks, disappear hunting, outwardly live as before, but in his soul anxiety and dissatisfaction with life grew. And in order to drown out these feelings in himself, Tolstoy plays music especially a lot; he plays the piano for 4-6 hours a day. While playing, he seemed to listen to himself, to his inner voice, to that new thing that was growing in his soul. Both in music and in hunting, he wanted to forget himself from the thoughts and sorrowful feelings that oppressed him. But the feeling of dissatisfaction was so strong that neither music, nor hunting, nor the performance of religious rituals could calm him down. In such cases, the writer tried to join the thick of the people, where he found, as it seemed to him, a solution to the doubts that tormented him, he gained faith in himself and in life.
After much painful thought, after intense searching, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that the class to which he belonged was not capable of being reborn, was not capable of saving the fate of his beloved homeland, was not capable of building a reasonable society in which everyone would be happy. He saw an impassable gulf between two worlds - the world of exploiters, swollen with the fat of high-ranking tsarist officials, and the world of the oppressed, living in hopeless poverty, and realized that all his ideals, all his hopes for class unity were crumbling, that the landowners would never agree to unite with by the people.
The writer clearly saw that everyone was deceiving the people: the government, the landowners, the merchants, and the priests. The writer is overcome by confusion and despair, he even thinks about suicide, just like his hero Levin in the novel Anna Karenina. How to live? What to do next? A writer cannot live without faith in the future of his people, his country. Where to find a foothold, what to cling to? And Tolstoy now turns all his attention to the working people. Tolstoy becomes so involved in the life of the common people that he himself begins to express their views, their interests, their worldview, that is, he finally leaves his class.
Tolstoy wrote about his spiritual revolution in Confession, which he began working on in early 1880. In it, he, summing up the results of his activities until the 80s, explained the reasons for the spiritual crisis. “I renounced the life of our circle, recognizing that this is not life, but only a semblance of life...”
Religious works also attract his attention. He reads the works of Archpriest Avvakum, the Gospel and others. In order to understand religious issues, to understand the lives of people and their way of life, Tolstoy in the spring of 1881 walked on foot with his servant S.P. Arbuzov to the monastery - Optina Pustyn. He considers his journey very important and useful. It is important for him to see “...how God’s world lives, big, real, and not the one we have created for ourselves and from which we never leave, even if we have traveled around the world.”
In the Optina Desert, Tolstoy becomes disillusioned with the elders. But the common people are more and more admired and admired for their wisdom and kindness.
Neither road adversities, nor travel difficulties, nor age stopped the writer. He himself said that the road was terribly difficult and restless for him, but nevertheless, again and again he left or went to Optina Pustyn, then to Kiev, then to the Samara steppes, then to Moscow, then to St. Petersburg.
And he is crazy looking for a storm,
As if there is peace in the storms.
With these words, Sofya Andreevna Lermontova expressed her husband’s endless desire to move, the eternal search for something new.
While Tolstoy's family wanted a quiet life, he thirsted for knowledge, sought the truth, wanted to know how people live. In search of truth, Tolstoy traveled to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, talked there with high clergy and came to an even greater conviction that the church with its servants defends the interests not of the people, but of their oppressors, the government. The confessors, according to Tolstoy, forever left the true path of serving people at the moment when they “sanctified the first king and assured him that he could help the faith with his name.” Wanting to expose the lies, deception of the church and the state and give advice to people on how to live, Tolstoy begins to write on religious and philosophical topics, he writes the article “Church and State,” which causes dissatisfaction from those around him.
But the writer was attracted to life more than peasants, the life of the village. Tolstoy talks for a long time with peasants, goes to huts, courtyards, visits peasant fields, meadows, works with them, tries to understand and comprehend their work, their moral principles, their morality, understand and study their speech. During a conversation with peasants, Tolstoy writes down individual words, folk proverbs, sayings, and apt folk expressions. The notebooks of 1879 later served Tolstoy as materials for many of his artistic works, mainly for folk stories.
80s. Moscow
Lev Nikolaevich's family grew. He already had seven children. The older children became adults. It was necessary to give them an education. And in the fall of 1881, the writer’s family moved to Moscow. Soon after moving to Moscow, Lev Nikolaevich began to identify children. The eldest son Sergei studied at the university, Ilya and Lev were assigned to the private Polivanovskaya gymnasium. For the eldest daughter Tatyana, the artist V.G. Perov was invited, and then she entered the painting school and later studied with the artist N.N. Ge.
Lev Nikolaevich was dissatisfied with the move to Moscow; he was burdened and irritated by the luxury of the rooms in which he settled. He was irritated by street noise, the hustle and bustle of the city, he was sad, looking for communication with the people and nature. To rid himself of melancholy, he began to cross the Moscow River by boat and go to the Sparrow Hills, and there, among nature, he found rest from city life, met working people in the forest, drank with joy, chopped wood with them and talked for a long time.
At the beginning of 1882, Tolstoy took an active part in the Moscow census, which was carried out over three days. After visiting the Khitrov market, where he saw hungry, dirty, half-naked people, after participating in the census, Tolstoy becomes even more seized with hatred of the ruling classes, and his sympathy for all the oppressed and enslaved grows even more. He reflects his observations during the census in his works. He begins to write a full of anger accusatory article "So what should we do?" Tolstoy boldly hurled fiery words of accusation at the world of masters, the world of oppressors. Simultaneously with his work on the article, Tolstoy continues to work on folk stories.
During his Moscow life, Tolstoy turned with all passion to the philosophy of the peoples of the East. He enthusiastically reads the Chinese thinker Confucius, reads everything that concerns the life of the Chinese people, their way of life, and religion. He reads the Chinese thinker Lao Tzu with interest, translates it into Russian, and writes down individual thoughts.
L.N. had great love. Tolstoy to Indian folk wisdom, to folk poetry. The ideas and thoughts of the Eastern sages were in tune with Tolstoy.
But philosophy could not resolve all the doubts and painful questions facing the writer. Not finding answers to his tormenting questions in philosophy, he turns to economic literature; the writer reads Henry George's book on the nationalization of land. It seemed to Tolstoy that he would now be able to resolve the complex peasant question of land. He tried to put George's theory into practice. And these attempts in life were reflected in the novel "Resurrection".
Since 1884, Tolstoy became a vegetarian, quit smoking, and strived for even greater simplicity of life. More and more persistently the thought takes hold of him: is it possible to leave this lordly estate, is it possible to settle in a peasant hut, to live together with the working people. But Tolstoy was still far from taking this step; he was still deeply rooted in the economy and was still firmly connected with his family.
Helping the Yasnaya Polyana widow Kopylova, who had many children, carry hay in the summer of 1886, L.N. Tolstoy hurt his leg and was bedridden for about three months. During his illness, Tolstoy recalled an incident from a court case given to him by the Tula prosecutor Davydov for introduction.
He wrote the play “The Power of Darkness” quite quickly; Tolstoy finished it at the end of 1886. In his play, Tolstoy shows how money spoils a person’s life and pushes him to commit crimes. They destroy the foundations of the peasant family, corrupt people, and trample on human feelings. They made both Matryona and Nikita, who were basically good people, criminals. The play depicts vivid images of peasants who are in the “power of darkness”, living in the “dark kingdom”.
In the same year as “The Power of Darkness,” one of Tolstoy’s wonderful stories was published, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” written on the theme of the horror of the dying of a person, whose entire being was filled with the insignificant and pitiful vanity of life.
Tolstoy had not yet finished his play “The Power of Darkness” when he began writing a new play, “The Fruits of Enlightenment.” This comedy is built on the opposition of two worlds - the world of dispossessed, robbed men and the world of robbers, oppressors of peasants. For a long time the tsarist government did not allow the comedy “Fruits of Enlightenment” to be published or staged in theaters, but the play circulated from hand to hand and was staged on home and amateur stages. Only in the fall of 1891 the first production took place on the stage of the Alexandria Theater.
Tolstoy's plays were performed not only in Russian theaters; they were also staged in theaters in Paris, London, and Berlin.
In the summer of 1887, the then famous actor V.N. came to Yasnaya Polyana. Andreev-Burlak, reciter. Burlak told Tolstoy a story about his wife's betrayal, which he heard from one of the passengers when he was traveling to Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy based this story on his new work, The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy began work on it in 1887 and finished it in 1889. The Kreutzer Sonata was a great success, but it was banned from publication and all attempts to obtain permission to publish it remained in vain. And only in March 1891, Sofya Andreevna, having achieved a personal meeting with the Tsar in St. Petersburg, received permission to print the “Kreutzer Sonata” in the complete collected works of Tolstoy.
90s. "Resurrection"
An expression of passionate protest against the fundamental foundations of the autocratic system was Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection,” on which he worked for ten years with interruptions from 1889 to 1899. The material for the novel “Resurrection” was the trial of a “fallen” woman, the prostitute Rosalia, accused of stealing one hundred rubles from her drunken “guest” merchant Smelkov and of poisoning him. She was found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The novel "Resurrection" widely covers Russian life at the end of the 19th century and touches on the deepest and most complex problems of that time.
In 1890, in early spring, during the period of work on “Resurrection”, in search of truth, Lev Nikolaevich again went to Optina Pustyn. Tolstoy still wants to know real faith. In Optina Hermitage, he talks with Elder Ambrose about different religions, but even there he does not find an answer to his pressing questions. Tolstoy left the monastery dissatisfied. He didn’t find any truth there, didn’t recognize any real faith, and the one he saw there was still the same deception, still the same lie.
In Yasnaya Polyana, the seeker of human happiness is now more than ever concerned about “idleness, fat.” It’s “hard, hard” for him. He is ashamed that he has to lead a dirty, vile life, so as not to disturb “love”, not to disturb family life. Tolstoy continues to have many guests. Empty conversations with them make him disgusted with an idle life, and he writes: “Guests are the disaster of our life.” Only the arrival of N.N. Ge for Tolstoy "great joy."
The main reason for Tolstoy's dissatisfaction and anxiety was that he did not see a real joyful life around him. “I’m very sad about the futility of life,” he writes in his diary. All his life Tolstoy sought happiness for the people. He believed that it should be here on earth, and not in heaven, as the ministers of the church assured. Tolstoy passionately wanted there to be no poor, beggars, hungry, prisons, executions, wars, murders and enmity between nations. The writer treated all peoples with equal respect; for him the equality of all people is an axiom, without which he cannot think. “What lies in the heart of one person lies in the consciousness of every other, and what lies in the consciousness of one people lies in the consciousness of every other,” he wrote in a letter to Goetz.
The writer believed that it was necessary to bring light to the people. Tolstoy considered the introduction of knowledge and science into the consciousness of the working people as an important matter and devoted a lot of attention and energy to the creation and dissemination of literature that would satisfy the needs of the people. But if literature is to serve the people, then this service must be free of charge, this service cannot be sold. And Lev Nikolaevich invites Sofya Andreevna to write a letter to the editors of Russkie Vedomosti about his renunciation of copyright to his works. And so that everyone who wishes, in Russia and abroad, has the right to publish free of charge his works written since 1881.
In 1891 - 1892, famine broke out in the central provinces of Russia. Tolstoy suffered painfully from the national disaster. Tolstoy's activities to help the starving took on the widest dimensions. He organizes canteens. In addition, he is trying to attract public attention to the national disaster that has broken out, writing an article “On Hunger.” The government was terribly indignant about the publication of the article. And with the same indignation the government greeted Tolstoy’s second article on the famine, “The Terrible Question,” and “Conclusion to the Last Report on Famine Relief” was even banned from printing in Russia; it was published abroad in 1896.
These articles reflected the entire terrible reality of the starving villages and were filled with such passionate pathos of denunciation, such anger towards the ruling class that even, against the will of the writer, they infected a significant part of Russian society with deep hatred of the existing system.
Tolstoy considered the inevitable change in existing forms of life, the inevitable destruction of the existing system. Tolstoy severely denounced the hated autocratic system in his journalistic articles and in his immortal novel “Resurrection.”
But no matter how much the tsarist government hated Tolstoy for his articles, the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not dare to bring Tolstoy to justice, since the writer’s popularity was great not only in Russia, but also abroad. Tolstoy's works, his ideas, and his fame as an original, original, brilliant writer spread far beyond the borders of Russia. Scientists, writers, and public figures came to him from abroad and established correspondence with him. Levenfeld came from Berlin. He wrote the first biography of Tolstoy in German.
Even in his youth, in his early works, Tolstoy preached the idea of self-improvement and now came to the conviction that the kingdom of prosperity must be created within the person himself. “The Kingdom of God is within you,” you need to improve your spirit, your consciousness, you need to free yourself from passions, from desires to achieve personal well-being, you need to create inner happiness, independent of external conditions, and develop such a point of view on life that no external conditions will interfere a good and happy life - these are the foundations of Tolstoy’s “teachings”.
Believing that a person’s life should be a kind of sermon on how to live, Tolstoy understood that his personal life did not always correspond to his expressed requirements for it and this was one of the reasons for his restless state, his increasing dissatisfaction with life.
For a long time now, the writer has been burdened by his position as an owner. Not wanting to remain one any longer, in July 1892 he signed a separate deed, according to which all real estate, that is, land, forest, buildings, were transferred to his wife and children.
In February 1895, Tolstoy wrote the story “The Master and the Worker” and sent it to print in January 1896. This story was eagerly awaited, because rumors had already spread that Tolstoy had dried up as an artist and could no longer write, and the story “The Master and the Worker” testified to the exact opposite. The story was a great success, although it caused a lot of controversy.
The spring of 1895 was the most difficult in the life of the Tolstoy couple. The youngest, thirteenth child, Vanechka, seven years old, dies, whose short life combined the late love of Lev Nikolaevich and Sofia Andreevna.
From 1897 to 1898, Tolstoy worked on his famous treatise “What is Art?” In 1899, the novel "Resurrection" was completed and published in the magazine "Niva".
The last ten years of L.N.’s life Tolstoy
And life, meanwhile, did not stand still. The 20th century was already on the threshold. The world was changing literally before our eyes. Tolstoy foresaw that the coming century would bring with it the threat of global wars of unprecedented scale. Tolstoy expressed his visionary thoughts in passionate, accusatory articles, and the whole world listened to his words. He listened, but there was no calm in him. Yasnaya Polyana by that time had become not just a family abode, but a place of pilgrimage. An endless stream of visitors from all over the world reached out to Tolstoy. “The whole world, the whole earth is looking at him: from China, India, America - from everywhere living, trembling threads are stretched to him, his soul is for everyone and forever,” M. Gorky wrote about him. The life of the great old man was filled with work, talking, reading...
After the novel "Resurrection" Tolstoy wants to write journalistic articles. But before starting with the articles, he also wrote the play “The Living Corpse.” He worked on it for more than six months. The main character of “The Living Corpse,” Fedya Protasov, is the living embodiment of the purely formal foundations of family life legalized by society and the state, which bind the spouses’ life together not with a feeling of mutual attraction, but with the bonds of legal coercion. The drama "The Living Corpse" was not completely finished by Tolstoy. It seemed to him that he was writing a frivolous thing, that he needed to depict the life of the people, but he forgot about it.
Tolstoy is occupied with the idea that it is necessary for everyone to refuse to serve and obey the state, which dooms the people to poverty, hunger and incredible suffering. In his articles, he sharply criticizes tsarist officials, the church, the state, and mercilessly exposes the perpetrators of the oppression of the working masses. He believes that there is only one means that can destroy government violence, and that is to “abstain people from participating in violence.” People, in his opinion, must improve themselves spiritually, and then the kingdom of God will be established on earth, that is, a happy life for people.
The writer, using living, concrete examples in an accessible and vivid form in his articles, showed the lack of rights of the working people, their terrible life, and immediately painted pictures of the idle life of those responsible for the death and suffering of thousands of the masses. These articles by Tolstoy filled the hearts of the people with love for the great writer, who with such courage threw fiery words of truth into the dark kingdom of lies and deception, words that burned the hearts of people.
In 1901, the Holy Synod excommunicated Tolstoy from the church and anathematized him. The immediate turn to excommunication was the novel “Resurrection,” mainly its chapters in which Tolstoy exposed the hypocrisy, deception of the state-owned church and ridiculed the then chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod, K. Pobedonostsev, in the image of Toporov. In all churches, on the instructions of the Holy Synod, during services they cursed the name of Tolstoy as an apostate, trying to arouse hatred of the writer among believers, using their religious feelings. But despite this, Tolstoy's popularity grew.
The excitement he experienced led Tolstoy to a painful state. In the spring of 1891, on the advice of doctors, Tolstoy traveled to Crimea. In Crimea, during his illness, Tolstoy did not abandon his literary studies. He gradually began to work on journalistic articles addressed to the working class. A.P. visited him in Gaspra. Chekhov, A.M. Bitter. Tolstoy's illness progressed unevenly. First he felt better, then again he felt worse. With the onset of summer 1902, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana.
In 1903, Tolstoy wrote the story “After the Ball,” the theme of which was a real incident. The story uses the principle of artistic contrast: a bright, colorful picture of a cheerful ball in a noble meeting is replaced by a harsh scene of painful punishment of a defenseless soldier. Simultaneously with the story, Tolstoy wrote three fairy tales. The motifs of these tales are taken from One Thousand and One Nights. The fairy tales were not allowed by censorship: they appeared in print only in 1906.
In 1904, the Russo-Japanese War broke out. Tolstoy was moved to the depths of his soul by the new people's grief. He sharply condemns governments that have unleashed a bloody massacre of peoples in their own interests. At this time he writes the article “Remember.” In it, Tolstoy called the Far Eastern War one of the most terrible atrocities that the tsarist government committed against the Russian people. Following the war of 1904, revolution broke out in Russia. The working class and peasantry rose up to fight the capitalists and landowners. Tolstoy’s attitude to the revolution of 1905 was contradictory; he welcomed it as a social movement that destroyed the violence of the exploiters, their centuries-old oppression, but Tolstoy was against the violent overthrow of capitalists and landowners, and against the violent liquidation of private property.
In 1908, Tolstoy wrote an unusually strong article “I Can’t Be Silent,” directed against the death penalty, against the government, executioners and robbers. After the suppression of the 1905 revolution, the tsarist government came down with all its might on the participants in the revolution. In many cities of Russia, executions of workers and peasants took place, gallows were erected on which advanced people who raised their voice or hand against the oppressors perished. In his article, Tolstoy pronounced a harsh sentence on both the tsarist government and its officials for the atrocities committed in the country; he considered them to be the perpetrators of the murders and deaths of thousands of leading people in Russia.
Tolstoy's most important works of the last decade include the wonderful historical story "Hadji Murat". I worked on this story until the last days of my life. In the introduction to Hadji Murat, Tolstoy openly formulated the main idea of his story: everything living, to the last strength, to the last breath, must fight for life, resist those forces that maim, disfigure, and kill life. He took the manuscript of “Hadji Murat” with him when he left Yasnaya Polyana forever, hoping to continue working on it, but the manuscript remained unfinished. The story was published after Tolstoy's death in 1912.
In the last months of his life, Tolstoy worked on the work “There are No Guilty People in the World,” which has come down to us in three unfinished versions. Each of them contrasts the lives of rich people and poor people.
In Tolstoy's diaries and letters, starting from the 80s, there were increasingly frequent confessions about his discord with his wife and almost all of his children due to opposing views on life, about his deep mental suffering caused by the fact that he did not dare to leave his wife and children, was forced to lead a “lordly life” that he hated. The roots of these differences went back to earlier years. In the very first months of family life, Tolstoy and his wife discovered that they looked at many things differently, that each of them had their own tastes, habits, and neither one nor the other intended to give them up. Tolstoy wanted to leave home for a long time, for thirty years, but all these years he did not dare to carry out his plan. All that was needed was a push.
Such an impetus was the fact that he saw how Sofya Andreevna was feverishly sorting through papers in his office, trying to find the official will about Lev Nikolaevich’s renunciation of copyright to his works, which was drawn up secretly from the family. It was too much. The cup of patience has run out. And he left. Gone into the darkness, into the unknown. He went on his last mournful journey.
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy died on November 7 (20), 1910 at the remote, unknown Astapovo station of the Moscow-Kursk railway. The coffin with Tolstoy's body was transported to Yasnaya Polyana. They buried him, as he wanted, in the Yasnaya Polyana forest "Zakaz", on the edge of a ravine, where, according to legend, a "green stick" was buried, on which was written something that should destroy all evil in people and give them great good...
The Lasker-Steinitz match began on November 7, 1896 in Moscow at the expense of a Russian philanthropist and lasted until January 14 of the following year. Someone in Tolstoy’s family suggested going to see two outstanding chess players play. L.N. Tolstoy readily agreed. But at this time, one of the writer’s followers, the English journalist E. Mood, intervened in the conversation, who noted that the professional game with its envy and squabbles and the fact that it puts abilities at the service of the game itself, contradicts the general spirit of his teaching. After this, Tolstoy calmly, addressing those present, said: “I think there is no need to go; Mood finds that this would be bad.” 
