Tolstoy: A Russian Life
Rosamund Bartlett
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 0151014388
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Magisterial sweep and scale.”—The Independent (UK)
In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, with a growing international following, and more revered than the tsar. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy had spent his life rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state.
In this, the first biography of Tolstoy in more than twenty years, Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including much fascinating material made available since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived. Above all, Bartett gives us an eloquent portrait of the brilliant, maddening, and contrary man who has once again been discovered by a new generation of readers.
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stock, marigold and delphinium. 38 Maria Nikolayevna had a good knowledge of five languages, including Russian, which was not all that common amongst upper-class Russian women at that time, for whom French was their first language. In his memoirs Tolstoy also records that his mother was an accomplished pianist, artistically sensitive, and a born storyteller. Apparently her tales were so compelling that the friends who gathered round at balls preferred listening to her to dancing. She wrote many
who continued to behave like the grande dame she had once been well into her dotage. Refined and graceful, with dreamy blue eyes and a fair complexion, Aline was fond of reading and she played the harp. 26 She scored a great success in Petersburg high society when she came out, and at the age of nineteen, in 1814, she was married off to Karl von Osten-Sacken, son of the Saxon ambassador to Russia, in what was thought to be a brilliant match. The young couple repaired to the family’s Baltic
sophisticated and aristocratic city than provincial Moscow, and he straight away decided he wanted to settle there. He took a room in the Hotel Napoleon, on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Vosnesensky Streets (it is now the Angleterre Hotel). If he was lucky, he would have been given a room facing the largest church in Russia – construction of the neoclassical St Isaac’s Cathedral was then nearing completion. When he was settled, Tolstoy sat down to write a long letter to his brother Sergey,
scripture along with being taught how to read and write. 26 It seems to have been a short-lived experiment, about which there is next to no documentation, but it is one of the first signs of Tolstoy’s awakening social conscience. Over the course of the next two decades popular education would become a cause very close to his heart. Tolstoy resumed his diary for one week in June 1850, but this was otherwise another year about which we have little information beyond knowing that he stayed put at
in return for acting as border guards along the edge of the empire, particularly its threatened southern frontier. Although they were subjects of the Russian Empire, and were usually Christian, the Terek Cossacks had their own language and looked very like their Chechen neighbours on the other side of the river, with whom they had peacefully co-existed for centuries. 49 The men wore tall fur hats and the same long tunics with strings of cartridges worn across their chest. 168 Tolstoy was