Eons before "Days of Our Lives" reared its ugly head on television, Tolstoy was a master of the soap opera. His serialized surveys of nineteenth-century Russian society are devoted to detailing in relentlessly romantic prose the epiphanies of love and war,...
[more]Eons before "Days of Our Lives" reared its ugly head on television, Tolstoy was a master of the soap opera. His serialized surveys of nineteenth-century Russian society are devoted to detailing in relentlessly romantic prose the epiphanies of love and war, the travails of the individual on the battlefield and in the bedroom, the tragedies that transpire therein, and the sanctimony of life as a Christian.
Tolstoy was born in 1828 to a family of nobles in Yasnaya, Russia. He was orphaned at the age of nine and raised by relatives, who ushered him off to university when he was only 16. There he studied languages and law, subjects that bored him so profoundly that he dropped out. In 1851 he joined the Russian army and was sent to fight at Sebastopol. It was this experience of war that inspired him to begin writing.
His first three novels, "Childhood" (1852), "Boyhood" (1854), and "Youth" (1857), fictionalize his early years as an orphan. The work that brought him into high repute, however, was less autobiographical and more historical: the 1,500-page epic "War and Peace' (1865-69). We meet 559 characters in this book, the greatest number in any work of fiction ever written. Their individual narratives are interwoven to tell the story of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the multitudes forced to flee Moscow, and the aristocrats ensconced in their country estates. As he chronicled the personal struggles of war, Tolstoy considered the philosophical and moral implications of the clash between tsarist Russia and the French Revolution.
If 'War and Peace' focuses on the political and the public, Tolstoy's next great work, 'Anna Karenina' (1875-77), is fully entrenched in the private. Set at a time when women's matrimonial ideals were shifting from economic arrangements to romantic love, the novel explores the question of woman's true social role. Anna is torn between her duties as a wife and mother and the allure of self-fulfillment through passion. But every seemingly open path inevitably closes, as society condemns and rejects her. The book performs a surprisingly modern analysis of gender's double standards.
Tolstoy's later work concentrates on his awakening to Christianity, and the inner turmoil that brought this conversion about. But his obsession with existential questions eventually led him to ultimate despair. His short story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" deals with a problem that plagued Tolstoy up until the very moment of his death: the thought that his entire life was utterly meaningless. He was never able to shake this thought; he confessed that it consumed him incessantly. He died in this state of despair in 1910.
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