Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Tolstoy - his life, social and religious views Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich his life

The life and work of Leo Tolstoy is still relevant today. The writer became the author of many immortal works. For example, "War and Peace", etc. To this day, Lev Nikolayevich is one of the great writers in the world.

Childhood
Tolstoy was born on 08/26/1828 in the Tula region, was the 4th child. His family was noble, large. Mother was from an ancient noble family - Princess Volkonskaya. She died in 1830. Then Lev Nikolaevich's cousin uncle began to raise children.

His father was a count. He died after 7 years. As a result, Lev Nikolaevich's aunt became the official guardian. After her death, the future writer, his sisters and brothers went to relatives in Kazan.

Education
At first, the future writer was educated at home. His teachers were Germans and French. In 1843 he entered the university, the faculty for the study of Oriental languages, then switched to law. Difficulties arose only in studies, and Leo dropped out of school in 1847, never having received a specialty.

Searching for yourself
He returned to his parental estate and tried to become a farmer. It was just a failed attempt. Young Tolstoy often wandered either to Moscow or to Tula. However, the habit of keeping a personal diary continued into adulthood. This prompted Tolstoy to write most of his works.

His older brother, having arrived home for a short while, convinced that Leo should go as a cadet to the army service. He agreed and in 1854 was sent to Sevastopol. He fought there until the autumn of 1855.

First publications
While Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, whose life and work is still relevant, was in the service, he often had free time. Then he wrote the story "Childhood". It includes the most vivid memories of the writer. In 1852, a new story by Tolstoy appeared in Sovremennik. It was his very first publication.

After that, he became as popular as other famous writers. After "Childhood" Lev Nikolaevich began to write about army service. In 1862, the work "Cossacks" appeared. Tolstoy managed to write even during periods of fierce battles. Then, in 1854, the work "" appeared.

It became a continuation of "Childhood". Then "Sevastopol Tales" appeared, Tolstoy returned back to Russia and gained great popularity. In 1857 he went to live in Paris, spent all his savings and returned home. In 1857, the work "" appeared.

Late creativity
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy: life and work briefly. In 1862, he published the first issue of Yasnaya Polyana and married Sophia Bers. They settled in Tolstoy's estate, the couple had children. The writer was happy. Then he was already writing the first volume of War and Peace. One part of it was published in 1865. Until 1868, Tolstoy wrote 3 more chapters. The work was completed in full a year later.

In 1873 Tolstoy began working on Anna Karenina. Partially, the work is based on real life events of the author. For example, the relationship between Levin and Kitty is a reflection of Lev Nikolaevich's courtship for his future wife. The novel was deeply appreciated by readers.

However, this did not particularly please Lev Nikolaevich - the author was in a deep depression. He created the Mediator. He tried to find strength in faith, but he was excommunicated from Orthodoxy. At some point, Tolstoy wanted to donate all his savings, but his wife categorically prevented such an impulse. Then a compromise followed - Lev Nikolaevich gave the copyright to his wife.

The last works of the writer
Tolstoy wrote a number of religious treatises. Among his last works were short stories about morality. The work "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" was very successful. In 1898, "Father Sergius" appeared, then - "Resurrection", "Living Corpse", "Hadji Murad", "After the Ball". Some of the works were published after the death of the writer.

The last years of the writer
In the last thirty years, Lev Nikolaevich has become a religious and even spiritual leader. However, his wife did not agree with his worldview, did not recognize the students who visited Tolstoy. In 1910, he went on a pilgrimage with his youngest daughter. They traveled the world incognito.

The name of the writer, educator, Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy is known to every Russian person. During his lifetime, 78 works of art were printed, 96 more were preserved in the archives. And in the first half of the 20th century, a complete collection of works was published, numbering 90 volumes and including, in addition to novels, stories, short stories, essays, etc., numerous letters and diary entries of this great man, who was distinguished by great talent and outstanding personal qualities. In this article, we recall the most interesting facts from the life of Leo Tolstoy.

House for sale in Yasnaya Polyana

In his youth, the count was known as a gambler and liked, unfortunately, not very successfully, to play cards. It so happened that part of the house in Yasnaya Polyana, where the writer spent his childhood, was given away for debts. Subsequently, Tolstoy planted trees in an empty place. Ilya Lvovich, his son, recalled how he once asked his father to show him the room in the house where he was born. And Lev Nikolaevich pointed to the top of one of the larches, adding: "There." And he described the leather sofa on which this happened in the novel War and Peace. These are interesting facts from the life of Leo Tolstoy, connected with the family estate.

As for the house itself, two of its two-story outbuildings have been preserved and have grown over time. After the marriage and the birth of children, the Tolstoy family grew, and in parallel with this, new premises were added.

Thirteen children were born in the Tolstoy family, five of whom died in infancy. The count never spared time for them, and before the crisis of the 80s he liked to play pranks. For example, if jelly was served during dinner, the father noticed that it was good for them to glue the boxes together. Children immediately brought in table paper, and the process of creativity began.

Another example. Someone in the family became sad or even burst into tears. The count who noticed this instantly organized the Numidian cavalry. He jumped up from his seat, raised his hand and rushed around the table, and the children rushed after him.

Tolstoy Leo Nikolayevich was always distinguished by a love of literature. He regularly hosted evening readings in his home. Somehow I took up a Jules Verne book without pictures. Then he began to illustrate it himself. And although the artist did not turn out to be a very good artist, the family was delighted with what they saw.

The children also remembered the humorous poems of Leo Tolstoy. He read them in the wrong German for the same purpose: at home. By the way, few people know that the writer's creative heritage includes several poetic works. For example, "Fool", "Volga-hero". They were mainly written for children and entered the well-known "ABC".

Thoughts of suicide

The works of Leo Tolstoy became for the writer a way of studying human characters in their development. Psychologism in the image often demanded great mental tension from the author. So, while working on Anna Karenina, trouble almost happened to the writer. He was in such a difficult state of mind that he was afraid to repeat the fate of his hero Levin and commit suicide. Later, in his Confession, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy noted that the thought of this was so insistent that he even took the cord out of the room where he changed clothes alone, and refused to hunt with a gun.

Disappointment in the Church

Nikolaevich is well studied and contains many stories about how he was excommunicated from the church. Meanwhile, the writer always considered himself a believer, and from the year 77, for several years, he strictly observed all fasts and attended every church service. However, after visiting Optina Pustyn in 1981, everything changed. Lev Nikolaevich went there with his footman and school teacher. They walked, as it should be, with a knapsack, in bast shoes. When they finally arrived at the monastery, they discovered terrible filth and strict discipline.

The pilgrims who came were settled on a common basis, which outraged the lackey, who always treated the owner as a master. He turned to one of the monks and said that the old man was Leo Tolstoy. The writer's work was well known, and he was immediately transferred to the best hotel room. After returning from Optina Hermitage, the count expressed his dissatisfaction with such servility, and since then he changed his attitude towards church conventions and its employees. It all ended with the fact that in one of the posts he took a cutlet for lunch.

By the way, in the last years of his life, the writer became a vegetarian, completely abandoning meat. But at the same time, he ate scrambled eggs every day in different forms.

Physical work

In the early 80s - this is reported by the biography of Leo Tolstoy Nikolayevich - the writer finally came to the conclusion that an idle life and luxury do not paint a person. For a long time he was tormented by the question of what he should do: sell all his property and leave his beloved wife and children unaccustomed to hard work without funds? Or transfer the entire fortune to Sofya Andreevna? Later, Tolstoy would divide everything between family members. At this difficult time for him - the family had already moved to Moscow - Lev Nikolayevich liked to go to the Sparrow Hills, where he helped the peasants cut firewood. Then he learned the craft of shoemaking and even designed boots and summer shoes from canvas and leather, in which he walked all summer. And every year he helped peasant families, in which there was no one to plow, sow and harvest bread. Not everyone approved of such a life of Lev Nikolayevich. Tolstoy was not understood even in his own family. But he remained adamant. And one summer, the whole of Yasnaya Polyana broke up into artels and went out for mowing. Among the workers there was even Sofya Andreevna, who was raking the grass with a rake.

Help for the starving

Noting interesting facts from the life of Leo Tolstoy, one can also recall the events of 1898. Famine broke out again in Mtsensk and Chernen uyezds. The writer, dressed in an old retinue and props, with a knapsack over his shoulders, together with his son, who volunteered to help him, personally traveled all the villages and found out where the situation was really beggarly. In a week, lists were compiled and about twelve canteens were created in each county, where they fed, first of all, children, the elderly and the sick. Products were brought from Yasnaya Polyana, two hot meals a day were prepared. Tolstoy's initiative caused a negative response from the authorities, who established constant control over him, and from local landowners. The latter considered that such actions of the count could lead to the fact that they themselves would soon have to plow the field and milk the cows.

One day, the officer came into one of the dining rooms and started a conversation with the count. He complained that although he approves of the writer's act, he is a forced man, therefore he does not know what to do - it was about the permission for such activities of the governor. The writer's answer turned out to be simple: "Do not serve where they are forced to act against conscience." And such was the whole life of Leo Tolstoy.

Serious illness

In 1901, the writer fell ill with a severe fever and, on the advice of doctors, went to the Crimea. There, instead of a cure, he caught another inflammation and there was practically no hope that he would survive. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, whose work contains many works describing death, prepared himself mentally for it. He was not at all afraid to part with his life. The writer even said goodbye to loved ones. And although he could only speak in a whisper, he gave each of his children valuable advice for the future, as it turned out, nine years before his death. This was very helpful, since nine years later none of the family members - and they almost all gathered at the Astapovo station - were not allowed to see the patient.

Writer's funeral

Back in the 90s, Lev Nikolaevich spoke in his diary about how he would like to see his funeral. Ten years later, in "Memoirs", he tells the story of the famous "green stick", buried in a ravine next to oaks. And already in 1908, he dictated a wish to the stenographer: to bury him in a wooden coffin at the place where the brothers were looking for a source of eternal goodness in childhood.

Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich, according to his will, was buried in the park of Yasnaya Polyana. The funeral was attended by several thousand people, among whom were not only friends, admirers of creativity, writers, but also local peasants, whom he treated with care and understanding all his life.

The history of the testament

Interesting facts from the life of Leo Tolstoy also concern his will regarding his creative heritage. The writer made six wills: in 1895 (diary entries), 1904 (letter to Chertkov), 1908 (dictated to Gusev), twice in 1909 and in 1010. According to one of them, all his recordings and works came into public use. According to others, the right to them was transferred to Chertkov. Ultimately, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy bequeathed his creativity and all his notes to his daughter Alexandra, who from the age of sixteen became her father's assistant.

Number 28

According to his relatives, the writer always treated prejudice ironically. But he considered the number twenty-eight special and loved it. What was it - a mere coincidence or rock of fate? It is not known, but many of the most important events of life and the first works of Leo Tolstoy are connected with her. Here is their list:

• August 28, 1828 - the date of birth of the writer himself.
• On May 28, 1856, censorship gave permission for the publication of the first book with stories, Childhood and Adolescence.
• On June 28, the first-born, Sergey, was born.
• On February 28, the wedding of the son of Ilya took place.
• On October 28, the writer left Yasnaya Polyana forever.

Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich(Count; 1828-1910) - the most famous writer in the history of general literature. Z eminent writer, who reached an unprecedented level in the history of literature of the 19th century. glory. In his face, a great artist and a great moralist were powerfully united.

The personal life of Leo Tolstoy, his perseverance, tirelessness, responsiveness, animation in defending his ideals, his attempt to abandon the blessings of this world, to live a new, good life, based on only high, ideal goals and knowledge of the truth - all this brings the charm of the name of Tolstoy to legendary proportions.

The rich and noble family to which he belongs, already in the time of Peter the Great, occupied a prominent position. It is not devoid of peculiar interest that great-great-grandfather Peter Andreevich The forerunner of such humane ideals had a sad role in the history of Tsarevich Alexei. Great-grandson of Peter Andreevich, Ilya Andreevich, is described in "War and Peace" in the face of the most good-natured, impractical old Count Rostov. Son of Ilya Andreevich, Nikolai Ilyich, was the father of Lev Nikolaevich. He is depicted quite close to reality in "Childhood" and "Boyhood" in the person of Father Nikolinka and partly in "War and Peace" in the person of Nikolai Rostov. In the rank of lieutenant colonel of the Pavlograd hussar regiment, he took part in the war of 1812 and after the conclusion of peace he retired. Having spent his youth merrily, Nikolai Ilyich lost a lot of money and completely upset his affairs. The passion for the game also passed to Leo Tolstoy, who, already being a famous writer, gambled recklessly.

To put his frustrated affairs in order, Nikolai Ilyich, like Nikolai Rostov, married the ugly and no longer very young Princess Volkonskaya. The marriage, however, was a happy one. They had four sons: Nikolai, Sergei, Dmitry and Lev, and a daughter, Maria. In addition to Leo, Nikolai was an outstanding person, whose death (abroad, in 1860) Tolstoy so amazingly described in one of his letters to Fet.

Tolstoy's maternal grandfather, Catherine's General, is brought to the stage in "War and Peace" in the face of a stern rigorist - the old Prince Bolkonsky. The best features of his moral temper, Lev Nikolaevich undoubtedly borrowed from the Volkonskys.

The writer's mother, depicted with great accuracy in "War and Peace" in the face of Princess Mary, possessed a wonderful gift for storytelling, for which, with her shyness passed on to her son, she had to lock herself with a large number of listeners who gathered around her in a dark room.

In addition to the Volkonskys, Tolstoy is closely related to a number of other aristocratic families - the princes Gorchakov, Trubetskoy and others.

Lev Nikolayevich was born on August 28, 1828 in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province. (15 versts from Tula), in the hereditary magnificent estate of her mother, Yasnaya Polyana, which has now gained worldwide fame.

Tolstoy was not even two years old when his mother died. A distant relative, T. A. Ergolskaya, took up the upbringing of orphaned children. In 1837 the family moved to Moscow, because the eldest son had to prepare for entering the university; but soon the father died suddenly, leaving affairs in a rather disorganized state, and the three younger children again settled in Yasnaya Polyana under the supervision of T.A. Ergolskaya and paternal aunt, Countess A. M. Osten-Saken. Here Lev Nikolaevich remained until 1840, when c. Osten-Saken and the children moved to Kazan, to a new guardian - the father's sister P. I. Yushkova.

This ends the first period of Tolstoy's life, described by him in "Childhood" with great accuracy in the transfer of thoughts and impressions and only with a slight change in external details. The Yushkovs' house, somewhat provincial in style, but typically secular, was one of the most cheerful in Kazan; all members of the family highly valued comme il faut and outward brilliance. " My good aunt Leo Tolstoy says the purest being, always said that she would want nothing more for me than that I have a relationship with a married woman"The two main principles of Tolstoy's nature - great pride and the desire to achieve something real, to know the truth - now entered into a struggle.

At the same time, a tense internal struggle and the development of a strict moral ideal were going on in him. The whole subsequent life of Leo Tolstoy is a painful struggle with the contradictions of life. If Belinsky can rightly be called great heart, then the epithet fits Tolstoy great conscience.

Receiving higher education, he studied at the Oriental and Law faculties. He was only enrolled at the university, studying very little and getting deuces and ones in exams. The failure of Tolstoy's university studies is hardly a mere accident. Being one of the truly great sages in the sense of being able to think about the purpose and purpose of human life, Tolstoy at the same time lacks the ability to think scientifically, that is, to subordinate his thought to the results of research. Having left the university even before the transitional exams for the 3rd year of law. faculty, Tolstoy from the spring of 1847 settled in Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy was very fond of Rousseau. With no one does he have so many points of contact as with the great hater of civilization and preacher of a return to primitive simplicity. The peasants, however, did not completely capture Tolstoy, he soon left for St. Petersburg and in the spring of 1848 began to take an exam for a candidate of jurisprudence. He successfully passed two exams, from criminal law and criminal proceedings, then he got tired of studying, and he again took it and simply left for the village. Later, he traveled to Moscow, where he often succumbed to an inherited passion for the game, which greatly upset his financial affairs.

During this period of life Leo Tolstoy. he was especially passionately interested in music (he played the piano not badly and was very fond of classical composers). Much time was also spent on carousing, playing and hunting.

Soon he decided to enter the military service, but there were obstacles in the form of a lack of necessary papers that were difficult to obtain, and Tolstoy lived for about 5 months in complete seclusion in Pyatigorsk, in a simple hut. In the autumn of 1851, having passed an exam in Tiflis, Tolstoy entered the 4th battery of the 20th artillery brigade, stationed in the Cossack village of Starogladovo, on the banks of the Terek, near Kizlyar, as a cadet. In a remote village, Tolstoy found the best part of himself: he began to write and in 1852 sent the first part of an autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, to the editors of Sovremennik.

Tolstoy, who was soon promoted to officer, remained in the Caucasus for two years, participating in many skirmishes and being exposed to all the dangers of military life in the Caucasus. He had the rights and claims to the St. George Cross, but did not receive it, which, apparently, was upset. When the Crimean War broke out at the end of 1853, Tolstoy transferred to the Danube army, participated in the battle of Oltenitsa and in the siege of Silistria, and from November 1854 to the end of August 1855 was in Sevastopol. All the horrors, hardships and suffering that befell his heroic defenders were also endured by Tolstoy. He lived for a long time on the terrible 4th bastion, commanded a battery in the battle of Chernaya, was during the hellish bombardment during the assault on Malakhov Kurgan.

Drinking parties and cards, carousing with gypsy friends took Tolstoy whole days and even nights. He was criticized for this by former comrades from the writers' circle. As a result, "people got sick of him and he got sick of himself" - and at the beginning of 1857 Tolstoy, without any regret, left Petersburg and went abroad. Western Europe made an unexpected impression on him - Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Italy - where Tolstoy spent only about 1½ years. And when he returned home, he actively engaged in the organization of schools in his Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy resolutely rebelled against all regulation and discipline in the school; the only method of teaching and education that he recognized was that no methods were needed. Everything in teaching should be individual - both the teacher and the student, and their mutual relationship. In the Yasnaya Polyana school, the children sat where they wanted, for as long as they wanted, and as they wanted. There was no specific curriculum. The teacher's only job was to keep the class interested. Despite this extreme pedagogical anarchism, the classes were going great. They were led by Tolstoy himself with the help of several permanent teachers and a few random ones, from the closest acquaintances and visitors.

At that time he began to have a strong feeling for Sofia Andreevna Bers, daughters of a Moscow doctor from Baltic Germans. He was already in his fourth decade, Sofya Andreevna was only 17 years old. Having endured passion for Sofya Andreevna in his heart for three years, Tolstoy married her in the autumn of 1862, and the greatest fullness of family happiness that only happens on earth fell to his lot. In the person of his wife, he found not only the most faithful and devoted friend, but also an indispensable assistant in all matters, practical and literary.

Tolstoy revels in the happiness of family life. During the first 10-12 years after his marriage, he creates "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina".

The horror lay in the fact that, being in the flower of strength and health, Leo Tolstoy lost all desire to enjoy the prosperity achieved; he had "nothing to live with", because he could not understand the purpose and meaning of life. In the sphere of material interests, he began to say to himself: “Well, all right, you will have 6,000 acres in the Samara province. - 300 heads of horses, and then? in the literary sphere: "Well, all right, you will be more glorious than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, all the writers in the world - so what!". Starting to think about raising children, he asked himself: “why?”; discussing “how the people can achieve prosperity,” he “suddenly said to himself: what does it matter to me?” In general, he “felt that what he stood on had given way, that what he lived by was no longer there.».

The natural result was the thought of suicide.. « I, a happy man, hid the cord from me so as not to hang myself on the crossbar between the closets in my room, where I was alone every day, undressing, and stopped going hunting with a gun, so as not to be tempted by a too easy way to rid myself of life. I myself did not know what I wanted: I was afraid of life, strove to get away from it, and, meanwhile, still hoped for something from it.". In order to find an answer to the questions and doubts that tormented him, Tolstoy first of all frantically rushed into the realm of theology. He began to conduct conversations with priests and monks, went to the elders in Optina Pustyn, read theological treatises, studied ancient Greek and Hebrew languages ​​in order to learn in the original the primary sources of Christian teaching.

At the same time, he kept an eye on the schismatic Old Believers, became close to the thoughtful peasant sectarian Syutaev, and talked with Molokans and Stundists. With the same feverishness he sought the meaning of life in the study of philosophy and in acquaintance with the results of the exact sciences. He made a series of attempts at greater and greater simplification, striving to live a life close to nature and agricultural life. Gradually he gives up the whims and comforts of a rich life, does a lot of manual labor, dresses in the simplest clothes, becomes a vegetarian, gives his family all his large fortune, renounces the rights of literary property.

In the opinion of people who are indignant at Tolstoy for turning from an artist into a preacher, these artistic teachings, written for a specific purpose, are grossly tendentious. But everyone understood that in the words of Tolstoy, the lofty and terrible truth.

Tolstoy directly comes to the conclusion that " the more we give ourselves to artistic beauty, the more we move away from good". Tolstoy pursues his new religious worldview, which was the fruit of many years of painful work of his deep analytical mind.The foundations of his worldview are in the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by violence, in saving the world with goodness and love, in saving a person through personal free self-improvement, in the denial of all coercive forms of society acting by an external force. (state, church hierarchy, military organization and war, etc.). Tolstoy attracted a huge number of followers in Russia

The latest fact of Tolstoy's biography is the decision of the Holy Synod of February 20-22, 1901. " A writer known to the whole world, - we read in this definition, - Russian by birth, Orthodox by his baptism and upbringing, Count Tolstoy, in the seduction of his proud mind, boldly rebelled against the Lord and His Christ and His holy property, clearly in front of everyone having renounced his Mother, the Orthodox Church, who nursed and raised him, and devoted his literary activity and the talent given to him by God to spread among the people teachings that are contrary to Christ and the Church, and to exterminate in the minds and hearts of people the faith of the father, the Orthodox faith, which established the universe , by which our ancestors lived and saved, and by which until now Holy Russia has been strong and strong. In his writings and letters, in the multitude scattered by him and his disciples all over the world, especially within the borders of our dear fatherland, he preaches, with the zeal of a fanatic, the overthrow of all the dogmas of the Orthodox Church and the very essence of the Christian faith: he rejects the personal living God, in Holy Trinity glorified, Creator and Provider of the universe; denies the Lord Jesus Christ, the God-man, Redeemer and Savior of the world, who suffered for us for the sake of men and for our salvation, and rose from the dead; denies the seedless conception according to the humanity of Christ the Lord and virginity before and after the birth of the Most Pure Theotokos Ever-Virgin Mary, does not recognize the afterlife and retribution, rejects all the sacraments of the Church and the grace-filled action of the Holy Spirit in them, and, scolding the most sacred objects of faith of the Orthodox people, did not shudder mock the greatest of the sacraments, the holy Eucharist." Because of all this, “the Church does not consider him a member and cannot consider him until he repents and restores his fellowship with her.».

Some of Tolstoy's works, written before 1905, were banned by censorship from being printed in Russia.

On August 28, 1908, the 80th anniversary of his birth was celebrated throughout the civilized world, despite the position of the Russian Church.

The religious problem has always stood for Count Tolstoy in the foreground. Experiencing a painful mental crisis in the late seventies, Count Tolstoy turned to a thorough study of the historical foundations of Christianity. For this purpose, he even studied the Jewish language under the guidance of the Moscow Rabbi Minor.

After rereading many commentaries on the Bible, Tolstoy unconditionally condemned all orthodox-nationalist statements and embarked on the path of broad universalism. According to Count Tolstoy, in the soul of the Russian people there is no hatred, either religious or tribal, towards foreigners. This hatred has been artificially instilled for centuries by a short-sighted and self-serving policy.

Judeophobia, in the eyes of Tolstoy, is not a faith, not a political conviction, but a morbid passion. Poisoned by their own poison, other anti-Semite maniacs reach the point of wild eccentricity and savage obscurantism.

It is not economic hardships, not regiments of enemy armies that destroy peoples and countries, but the disintegration of inner strength, the degeneration of the moral core and the pernicious infection of national intolerance - this is what sweeps tribes and states from the face of the earth. Rome, Egypt and Babylon fell and crumbled for hatred of the peoples who inhabited their country, for hatred, like ice, cannot be a binding cement for a long time. Woe to that country where subjugated and destitute peoples, doused with malice and frozen with fierce cruelty, serve as the pillars of a fragile statehood.

Only deliberate slander can assert that between Jews and Christians there is a spontaneous, racial enmity, an ineradicable tribal strife. If some think that, by squeezing the Jews, they are fulfilling the irresistible decree of fate, which for some reason doomed entire nations to suffering, then their blind habit must be countered by the undoubted truth, expressed in antiquity by one Jewish teacher: God, as it were, does not care about the food of the poor, so that we have a reason to do a good deed to get rid of the torments of the future; God allows the lack of rights of individual nationalities, so that we have a reason to correct all previous sins in relation to foreigners by a living feat of active peacefulness.

Of the Hebrew legends, Count Tolstoy especially appreciated the legend " About the lament of the patriarchs"for the optimistic faith in the nearness of that time," when the peoples, having forgotten strife, will unite in a great family "; a story about the birth of Abraham for his immortal, captivating dream of nature rejoicing at the birth of a new spiritual leader.

The close and inseparable relationship between the religion of Israel and the moral gospel of Jesus predetermines, according to Tolstoy, the obligation for true Christians to carefully guard against all the temptations of intolerance towards the Jews. " Jews are persecuted only for their faith - baptism entails, for the most part, almost complete equality in rights».

No, in Tolstoy's eyes, there is no more blasphemous combination of concepts than religious persecution. Religion certainly excludes hatred and persecution, because the first natural movement of the human soul, in which a religious feeling has awakened, is the consciousness of the power over oneself of a high power that called him to life and desires the good of all living things. Just as a religious soul cannot harbor a vindictive feeling towards those who persist in prejudice, so it cannot be characterized by an arrogant alienation from those who seek divine truth insatiably, but seek in other ways. People who raise the sword of religious persecution are dead and not yet born to faith.

In creating the Jewish question, they are making a terrible mistake. In national disputes, especially in relation to a dependent people, it is necessary, first of all, to eliminate all repressions and all kinds of restrictions on rights. Evil can only be overcome with good. If some Jews pay active anti-Semites in kind, if centuries of insults and oppression accumulate vindictive feelings among the persecuted, then the Russian people, who have seen this long-standing mistake, can only correct it with patient and unfeigned generosity.

Some of the worldly weaknesses often attributed to commercial Jewry are, in Tolstoy's interpretation, the direct result of persecution. " To get rid of them, you need to fight persecution, not with them.". The best argument in favor of the Jews is, according to Tolstoy, those incredible excesses that others allow themselves militant Judeophobes and from the church pulpit , and from the parliamentary rostrum.

“If all the accusations against the Jews, the accusations that I personally do not believe, were just, then even then it would remain undoubted that the Jews could not do any harm to people living a Christian life"- Count Tolstoy.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is a great Russian writer, by origin - a count from a famous noble family. He was born on August 28, 1828 in the Yasnaya Polyana estate located in the Tula province, and died on October 7, 1910 at the Astapovo station.

Writer's childhood

Lev Nikolaevich was a representative of a large noble family, the fourth child in it. His mother, Princess Volkonskaya, died early. At this time, Tolstoy was not yet two years old, but he formed an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhis parent from the stories of various family members. In the novel "War and Peace" the image of the mother is represented by Princess Marya Nikolaevna Bolkonskaya.

Biography of Leo Tolstoy in the early years is marked by another death. Because of her, the boy was left an orphan. The father of Leo Tolstoy, a participant in the war of 1812, like his mother, died early. This happened in 1837. At that time the boy was only nine years old. The brothers of Leo Tolstoy, he and his sister were transferred to the upbringing of T. A. Ergolskaya, a distant relative who had a huge influence on the future writer. Childhood memories have always been the happiest for Lev Nikolayevich: family traditions and impressions from life in the estate became rich material for his works, reflected, in particular, in the autobiographical story "Childhood".

Studying at Kazan University

The biography of Leo Tolstoy in his youth was marked by such an important event as studying at the university. When the future writer was thirteen years old, his family moved to Kazan, to the house of the children's guardian, a relative of Lev Nikolaevich P.I. Yushkova. In 1844, the future writer was enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy of Kazan University, after which he transferred to the Faculty of Law, where he studied for about two years: the young man did not arouse keen interest in studying, so he indulged in various secular entertainments with passion. Having filed a letter of resignation in the spring of 1847, due to poor health and "domestic circumstances", Lev Nikolayevich left for Yasnaya Polyana with the intention of studying the full course of legal sciences and passing an external exam, as well as learning languages, "practical medicine", history, rural economy, geographical statistics, painting, music and writing a dissertation.

Youth years

In the autumn of 1847, Tolstoy left for Moscow, and then for St. Petersburg in order to pass the candidate's exams at the university. During this period, his lifestyle often changed: he studied various subjects all day long, then he devoted himself to music, but wanted to start a career as an official, then he dreamed of becoming a cadet in a regiment. Religious moods that reached asceticism alternated with cards, carousing, trips to the gypsies. The biography of Leo Tolstoy in his youth is colored by the struggle with himself and introspection, reflected in the diary that the writer kept throughout his life. In the same period, interest in literature arose, the first artistic sketches appeared.

Participation in the war

In 1851, Nikolai, the elder brother of Lev Nikolaevich, an officer, persuaded Tolstoy to go to the Caucasus with him. Lev Nikolaevich lived for almost three years on the banks of the Terek, in a Cossack village, leaving for Vladikavkaz, Tiflis, Kizlyar, participating in hostilities (as a volunteer, and then was hired). The patriarchal simplicity of the life of the Cossacks and the Caucasian nature struck the writer with their contrast with the painful reflection of the representatives of an educated society and the life of the noble circle, gave extensive material for the story "Cossacks", written in the period from 1852 to 1863 on autobiographical material. The stories "Raid" (1853) and "Cutting down the forest" (1855) also reflected his Caucasian impressions. They left a mark in his story "Hadji Murad", written in the period from 1896 to 1904, published in 1912.

Returning to his homeland, Lev Nikolaevich wrote in his diary that he fell in love with this wild land, in which "war and freedom" are combined, things that are so opposite in their essence. Tolstoy in the Caucasus began to create his story "Childhood" and anonymously sent it to the journal "Contemporary". This work appeared on its pages in 1852 under the initials L. N. and, along with the later "Boyhood" (1852-1854) and "Youth" (1855-1857), made up the famous autobiographical trilogy. The creative debut immediately brought real recognition to Tolstoy.

Crimean campaign

In 1854, the writer went to Bucharest, to the Danube army, where the work and biography of Leo Tolstoy were further developed. However, soon a boring staff life forced him to transfer to the besieged Sevastopol, to the Crimean army, where he was a battery commander, having shown courage (he was awarded medals and the Order of St. Anna). Lev Nikolaevich during this period was captured by new literary plans and impressions. He began to write "Sevastopol stories", which were a great success. Some of the ideas that arose even at that time make it possible to guess in the artillery officer Tolstoy the preacher of later years: he dreamed of a new "religion of Christ", cleansed of mystery and faith, a "practical religion".

Petersburg and abroad

Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich arrived in St. Petersburg in November 1855 and immediately became a member of the Sovremennik circle (which included N. A. Nekrasov, A. N. Ostrovsky, I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov and others). He took part in the creation of the Literary Fund at that time, and at the same time became involved in the conflicts and disputes of writers, but he felt like a stranger in this environment, which he conveyed in "Confession" (1879-1882). Having retired, in the autumn of 1856 the writer left for Yasnaya Polyana, and then, at the beginning of the next, in 1857, he went abroad, visiting Italy, France, Switzerland (impressions from visiting this country are described in the story "Lucerne"), and also visited Germany. In the same year, in the autumn, Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich returned first to Moscow, and then to Yasnaya Polyana.

Opening of a public school

Tolstoy in 1859 opened a school for the children of peasants in the village, and also helped set up more than twenty such educational institutions in the Krasnaya Polyana region. In order to get acquainted with the European experience in this area and apply it in practice, the writer Leo Tolstoy again went abroad, visited London (where he met with A. I. Herzen), Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium. However, European schools somewhat disappoint him, and he decides to create his own pedagogical system based on the freedom of the individual, publishes teaching aids and works on pedagogy, and puts them into practice.

"War and Peace"

In September 1862, Lev Nikolaevich married Sofya Andreevna Bers, the 18-year-old daughter of a doctor, and immediately after the wedding he left Moscow for Yasnaya Polyana, where he devoted himself entirely to household chores and family life. However, already in 1863, he was again captured by a literary plan, this time creating a novel about the war, which was supposed to reflect Russian history. Leo Tolstoy was interested in the period of our country's struggle with Napoleon in the early 19th century.

In 1865, the first part of the work "War and Peace" was published in the Russian Messenger. The novel immediately drew a lot of responses. The subsequent parts provoked heated debates, in particular, the fatalistic philosophy of history developed by Tolstoy.

"Anna Karenina"

This work was created in the period from 1873 to 1877. Living in Yasnaya Polyana, continuing to teach peasant children and publish his pedagogical views, in the 70s Lev Nikolayevich worked on a work about the life of contemporary high society, building his novel on the contrast of two storylines: Anna Karenina's family drama and Konstantin Levin's home idyll , close both in psychological drawing, and in convictions, and in the way of life to the writer himself.

Tolstoy strove for an outward nonjudgmental tone of his work, thereby paving the way for a new style of the 80s, in particular, folk stories. The truth of peasant life and the meaning of the existence of representatives of the "educated class" - this is the circle of questions that interested the writer. "Family thought" (according to Tolstoy, the main one in the novel) is translated into a social channel in his creation, and Levin's self-exposures, numerous and merciless, his thoughts about suicide are an illustration of the author's spiritual crisis experienced in the 1880s, which matured while working on it. novel.

1880s

In the 1880s, the work of Leo Tolstoy underwent a transformation. The upheaval in the mind of the writer was also reflected in his works, primarily in the experiences of the characters, in that spiritual insight that changes their lives. Such heroes occupy a central place in such works as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (years of creation - 1884-1886), "Kreutzer Sonata" (a story written in 1887-1889), "Father Sergius" (1890-1898), drama "The Living Corpse" (left unfinished, begun in 1900), as well as the story "After the Ball" (1903).

Publicism of Tolstoy

Tolstoy's journalism reflects his spiritual drama: depicting pictures of the idleness of the intelligentsia and social inequality, Lev Nikolayevich posed questions of faith and life to society and himself, criticized the institutions of the state, reaching the denial of art, science, marriage, court, achievements of civilization.

The new worldview is presented in "Confession" (1884), in the articles "So what shall we do?", "On the famine", "What is art?", "I can't be silent" and others. The ethical ideas of Christianity are understood in these works as the foundation of the brotherhood of man.

Within the framework of the new worldview and humanistic idea of ​​the teachings of Christ, Lev Nikolayevich spoke out, in particular, against the dogma of the church and criticized its rapprochement with the state, which led to the fact that he was officially excommunicated from the church in 1901. This caused a huge uproar.

Novel "Sunday"

Tolstoy wrote his last novel between 1889 and 1899. It embodies the whole range of problems that worried the writer during the years of the spiritual turning point. Dmitry Nekhlyudov, the main character, is a person who is internally close to Tolstoy, who goes through the path of moral purification in the work, eventually leading him to comprehend the need for active goodness. The novel is built on a system of evaluative oppositions that reveal the unreasonableness of the structure of society (the falsity of the social world and the beauty of nature, the falsity of the educated population and the truth of the peasant world).

last years of life

The life of Leo Tolstoy in recent years was not easy. The spiritual break turned into a break with his environment and family discord. The refusal to own private property, for example, caused dissatisfaction among the writer's family members, especially his wife. The personal drama experienced by Lev Nikolayevich was reflected in his diary entries.

In the autumn of 1910, at night, secretly from everyone, 82-year-old Leo Tolstoy, whose dates of life were presented in this article, accompanied only by his attending physician D.P. Makovitsky, left the estate. The journey turned out to be unbearable for him: on the way, the writer fell ill and was forced to disembark at the Astapovo railway station. In the house that belonged to her boss, Lev Nikolaevich spent the last week of his life. Reports about his health at that time were followed by the whole country. Tolstoy was buried in Yasnaya Polyana, his death caused a huge public outcry.

Many contemporaries arrived to say goodbye to this great Russian writer.

"To live honestly." The beginning of the creative path.

“It’s funny for me to remember how I thought and how you seem to think that you can arrange for yourself a happy and honest little world in which you can live calmly, without mistakes, without repentance, without confusion, and do everything slowly, carefully, only good things. It's funny!.. To live honestly, you have to tear, get confused, fight, make mistakes, start "and quit, and start again and quit again, and always fight and lose. And peace is spiritual meanness."

These words of Tolstoy from his letter (1857) explain a lot in his life and work. Glimpses of these ideas arose early in Tolstoy's mind. He repeatedly recalled the game, which he loved very much as a child. It was invented by the eldest of the Tolstoy brothers - Nikolenka. “So, when my brothers and I were - I was five, Mitenka was six, Seryozha was seven years old, he announced to us that he had a secret, through which, when it was revealed, all people would become happy; there will be no illnesses, no troubles, no one will be angry with anyone, and everyone will love each other, everyone will become ant brothers. (Probably these were the "Moravian brothers"1; whom he had heard or read about, but in our language they were ant brothers.) And I remember that the word "ant" was especially liked, reminiscent of ants in a tussock.

The secret of human happiness was, according to Nikolenka, "written by him on a green stick, and this stick was buried by the road on the edge of the ravine of the Old Order." To learn the secret, it was necessary to fulfill many difficult conditions...

The ideal of the "ant" brothers - the brotherhood of people from all over the world - Tolstoy carried through his whole life. “We called it a game,” he wrote at the end of his life, “and yet everything in the world is a game, except for this ...”

Tolstoy's childhood years were spent in the Tula estate of his parents - Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy did not remember his mother: she died when he was not two years old. At the age of 9, he also lost his father. A participant in foreign campaigns during the Patriotic War, Tolstoy's father was one of the nobles who were critical of the government: he did not want to serve either at the end of the reign of Alexander I, or under Nicholas. “Of course, I didn’t understand anything about this in my childhood,” Tolstoy recalled much later, “but I understood that my father never humiliated himself before anyone, did not change his lively, cheerful and often mocking tone. And this self-esteem, which I saw in him, increased my love, my admiration for him.

The teacher of the orphaned children of the Tolstoys (four brothers and sister Mashenka) was a distant relative of the family, T. A. Yergolskaya. “The most important person in terms of influence on my life,” the writer said about her. Auntie, as her pupils called her, was a person of a decisive and selfless character. Tolstoy knew that Tatyana Alexandrovna loved his father and his father loved her, but circumstances separated them.

Tolstoy's children's poems dedicated to "dear aunt" have been preserved. He began writing at the age of seven. A notebook for 1835 has come down to us, entitled: “Children's fun. The first division... Here are the different breeds of birds.

Tolstoy received his initial education at home, as was customary then in noble families, and at the age of seventeen he entered Kazan University. But classes at the university did not satisfy the future writer. A powerful spiritual energy awakened in him, which he himself, perhaps, was not yet aware of. The young man read a lot, thought. “... For some time,” T. A. Ergolskaya wrote in her diary, “the study of philosophy occupies his days and nights. He only thinks about how to delve into the mysteries of human existence. Apparently, for this reason, the nineteen-year-old Tolstoy left the university and went to Yasnaya Polyana, which he inherited.

Here he tries to find a use for his powers. He keeps a diary in order to give himself “a report every day from the point of view of those weaknesses from which you want to improve”, draws up “rules for the development of the will”, takes up the study of many sciences, decides to improve the life of the peasants.

But the plans for self-education turn out to be too grandiose, and the peasants do not understand the young master and do not want to accept his good deeds.

Tolstoy rushes about, looking for goals in life. He is either going to go to Siberia, then he goes to Moscow and spends several months there - by his own admission, “very carelessly, without service, without employment, without a goal”; then he goes to St. Petersburg, where he successfully passes the exams for the degree of candidate at the university, but does not complete this undertaking either; then he is going to enter the Horse Guards Regiment; then suddenly decides to rent a postal station...

In the same years, Tolstoy was seriously engaged in music, opened a school for peasant children, took up the study of pedagogy ...

In a painful search, Tolstoy gradually comes to the main thing to which he devoted the rest of his life - to literary creativity. The first ideas arise, “the first sketches appear.

In 1851, together with his brother Nikolai Tolstoy, he set off;; to the Caucasus, where there was an endless war with the highlanders, he went, however, with the firm intention of becoming a writer. He participates in battles and campaigns, gets close to people new to him and at the same time works hard.

Tolstoy conceived to create a novel about the spiritual development of man. In the first year of the Caucasian service, he wrote "Childhood". The story has been revised four times. In July 1852, Tolstoy sent his first completed work to Nekrasov in Sovremennik. This testified to the young writer's great respect for the magazine. An insightful editor, Nekrasov highly appreciated the talent of the novice author, noted the important advantage of his work - "the simplicity and reality of the content." The story was published in the September issue of the magazine.

So a new outstanding writer appeared in Russia - it was obvious to everyone.

Later, "Boyhood" (1854) and "Youth" (1857) were published, which, together with the first part, constituted an autobiographical trilogy.

The protagonist of the trilogy is spiritually close to the author, endowed with autobiographical features. This feature of Tolstoy's work was first noted and explained by Chernyshevsky. "Self-deepening", tireless observation of oneself was for the writer a school of knowledge of the human psyche. Tolstoy's diary (the writer kept it from the age of 19 throughout his life) was a kind of creative laboratory.

The study of human consciousness, prepared by self-observation, allowed Tolstoy to become a deep psychologist. In the images he created, the inner life of a person is exposed - a complex, contradictory process, usually hidden from prying eyes. Tolstoy reveals, according to Chernyshevsky, "dialectics of the human soul", i.e., "hardly perceptible phenomena ... of inner life, succeeding one another with extraordinary rapidity and inexhaustible variety."

The story "Childhood" begins with a trifling event. Karl Ivanovich killed a fly over Nikolenka's head and woke him up. But this event immediately reveals the inner life of a ten-year-old man: it seems to him that the teacher deliberately offends him, he bitterly experiences this injustice. The affectionate words of Karl Ivanovich make Nikolenka repent: he no longer understands how, a minute before, “could not love Karl Ivanovich

and find disgusting his dressing gown, cap and tassel. Niko-Lenka cries out of annoyance at himself. The boy cannot answer the sympathetic questions of the teacher and invents that he had a bad dream: “as if the tatap had died and they were carrying her to bury.” And now gloomy thoughts about a fictitious dream do not leave the frustrated Nikolenka ...

But this is only morning, and how many other events of the day leave a mark in the soul of a child! He no longer gets acquainted with an imaginary, but with a real injustice: his father wants to fire Karl Ivanovich, who lived in the family for twelve years, taught his children everything he knew himself, and now he is no longer needed. Nikolenka worries about the impending separation from her mother. He ponders over the strange words and deeds of the holy fool Grisha; boils with the delight of the hunt and burns with shame, frightening the hare; experiences "something like first love" for dear Katenka, the governess's daughter; boasts to her of skillful riding and, much to his embarrassment, nearly falls off his horse...

Before the reader, the image is revealed not only of a little boy who grows up, becomes a teenager, then a young man. In the trilogy, the image of another Nikolai Irteniev, the narrator, also appears. It is he, having become an adult, who again experiences and analyzes his life in order to find answers to the main questions for each person: what should one be? What to strive for?

Irteniev the narrator most closely and severely analyzes his attitude towards people of the "lower strata", towards the "common people". Obviously, this question seemed to both Tolstoy and his hero the most important in determining the future path of life.

One of the chapters of "Childhood" is dedicated to Natalya Savishna. She nursed Nikolenka's mother, then became a housekeeper. Nikolenka, like all his relatives, was so accustomed to the love and devotion of Natalia Savishna that he did not feel any sense of gratitude and never asked himself questions: is she happy, satisfied? And so it happened that Natalya Savishna dared to punish her pet for the soiled tablecloth. Nikolenka burst into tears with anger. "How! - I said to myself, walking around the hall and choking with tears. - Natalya Savishna, just Natalia speaks me you and also beats me in the face with a wet tablecloth, like a yard boy. No, it's terrible! The timid, affectionate apology of Natalya Savishna made the boy cry again - "not from anger, but from love and shame."

But the boy was still far from realizing how shameful lordly arrogance is. This is understood only by the “second” Nikolai Irteniev, the narrator, recalling Natalya Savishnu with filial love, drawing his truly aristocratic ingratitude with bitter reproach. And the “younger” Nikolenka Irtenyev had to learn many more life lessons in order to understand the groundlessness of his claims to a special place among people. When the siege of Sevastopol by the Anglo-French and Turkish troops began (1854), the young writer seeks transfer to the active army. The thought of defending his native land inspired Tolstoy. Arriving in Sevastopol, he informed his brother: "The spirit in the troops is beyond any description ... Only our army can stand and win (we will still win, I am convinced of this) under such conditions."

Tolstoy conveyed his first impressions of Sevastopol in the story "Sevastopol in December" (in December 1854, a month after the start of the siege). The story, written in April 1855, showed Russia for the first time the besieged city in its true grandeur. The war was depicted by the author without embellishment, without loud phrases that accompanied the official news about Sevastopol on the pages of magazines and newspapers.

The everyday, outwardly disorderly bustle of the city that has become a military camp, the overcrowded infirmary, nuclear strikes, grenade explosions, the torment of the wounded, blood, dirt and death - this is the situation in which the defenders of Sevastopol simply and honestly, without further ado, did their hard work. “Because of the cross, because of the name, because of the threat, people cannot accept these terrible conditions: there must be another, high motivating reason,” Tolstoy said. “And this reason is a feeling that is rarely manifested, bashful in Russian, but lies in in the depths of everyone's soul is love for the motherland.

For a month and a half, Tolstoy commanded a battery on the fourth bastion, the most dangerous of all, and wrote Youth and Sevastopol Tales there between the bombardments. Tolstoy took care of maintaining the fighting spirit of his comrades-in-arms, developed a number of valuable military-technical projects, worked on creating a society for the education of soldiers, and on publishing a magazine for this purpose. And for him it became more and more obvious not only the greatness of the defenders of the city, but also the impotence of feudal Russia, which was reflected in the course of the Crimean War.

The writer decided to open the eyes of the government to the position of the Russian army. In a special note intended for transmission to the tsar's brother, he revealed the main reason for military failures: “In Russia, with such a powerful material force and the strength of its spirit, there is no army; there are crowds of oppressed slaves who obey thieves, oppressive mercenaries and robbers ... "

But an appeal to a high-ranking person could not help the cause. Tolstoy decided to tell Russian society about the disastrous situation in Sevastopol and the entire Russian army, about the inhumanity of the war. Tolstoy fulfilled his intention by writing the story "Sevastopol in May" (1855).

Closely connected with the previous one, this story, however, marked a new stage in Tolstoy's work. It is "Sevastopol in May" - the beginning of the "tearing off all and sundry masks", which, according to Lenin, is typical of Tolstoy's work. This is the first blow of Tolstoy's criticism of official ideology, politics, and the state.

Tolstoy paints war as madness, making people doubt the mind.

There is an amazing scene in the story. A truce is called to remove the corpses. The soldiers of the armies at war among themselves "with greedy and benevolent curiosity strive one for the other." Conversations begin, jokes and laughter are heard. Meanwhile, a ten-year-old child wanders among the dead, picking blue flowers. And suddenly, with dull curiosity, he stops in front of the headless corpse, looks at it and runs away in horror.

“And these people - Christians ... - the author exclaims - will not suddenly fall on their knees with repentance ... will they not embrace like brothers? No! The white rags are hidden, and again the instruments of death and suffering whistle, honest, innocent blood is shed again, and groans and curses are heard.

Tolstoy judges the war from a moral point of view. It exposes its influence on human morality. Napoleon, for the sake of his ambition, destroys millions, and some ensign Petrushkov, this "little Napoleon, little monster, is now ready to start a battle, kill a hundred people just to get an extra star or a third of the salary."

In one of the scenes, Tolstoy draws a clash between "little monsters" and ordinary people. Soldiers, wounded in a heavy battle, wander into the infirmary. Lieutenant Nepshitshetsky and adjutant Prince Galtsin, who watched the battle from afar, are convinced that there are many malingerers among the soldiers, and they shame the wounded, reminding them of patriotism. Galtsin stops a tall soldier.

“Where are you going and why? he shouted sternly at him. “No…” but at that moment, approaching the soldier quite close, he noticed that his right hand was behind a cuff and bloody above the elbow.

Wounded, your honor!

What is injured?

It must have been a bullet here, - said the soldier, pointing to his hand, - but already here I can’t know what hit my head, - and he, bending it, showed the bloody, matted hair on the back of his head.

Whose other gun is it?

Stutser French, your honor, took away; yes, I wouldn’t go if it weren’t for this soldier to see him off, otherwise he would fall unequally ... ”Here even Prince Galtsin felt ashamed. However, shame did not torment him for long: the very next day, walking along the boulevard, he boasted of his "participation in the case" ...

The third of the "Sevastopol stories" - "Sevastopol in August 1855" - is dedicated to the last period of defense. Again, before the reader is the everyday and all the more terrible face of the war, hungry soldiers and sailors, officers exhausted by inhuman life on the bastions, and away from the fighting - quartermaster thieves with a very militant appearance.

From individuals, thoughts, destinies, the image of a heroic city is formed, wounded, destroyed, but not surrendered.

Work on life material related to the tragic events in the history of the people prompted the young writer to determine his artistic position. Tolstoy ends the story “Sevastopol in May” with the words: “The hero of my story, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I tried to reproduce in all its beauty and who has always been, is and will be beautiful, is true.”

The last Sevastopol story was completed in St. Petersburg, where Tolstoy arrived at the end of 1855 as an already famous writer.

Ideological searches of Tolstoy in the late 50s-60s.

The public upsurge that came in Russia after the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas I, the participation of Tolstoy himself in historical events, observations of the life of soldiers, of the life of the people - all this caused the young writer to think about the fate of the enslaved country.

Tolstoy clearly sees "that the main evil lies in the most miserable, miserable condition of the peasants." All his thoughts are about how to save the people from impoverishment, from physical and moral death.

Spiritually close to Tolstoy is the hero of his story "The Morning of the Landowner" (1856) - Dmitry Nekhlyudov. The young master believes that his vocation is "to wish to do good and love him." He decided to devote his life to a noble goal: to save the peasants from poverty, “to give them satisfaction, to give them education ... to correct their vices, born of ignorance, superstition, to develop them morally, to make them fall in love with goodness ...” But this lofty goal turns out to be unattainable. The poverty of the people is so without

borderline that it cannot be overcome by private charity.

Walking around his serfs, Nekhlyudov sees rickety, half-rotten huts, emaciated women, skinny children. And the worst thing is that the peasants are accustomed to poverty and are indifferent to it. Some of them gave up on everything and prefer to do nothing. Dull obedience or deaf despair, drunkenness, family strife - this is what depresses an enthusiastic young man. He is convinced that there is some kind of blank wall between him and his peasants: they do not believe him, they do not understand what he wants. Suspicion, alienation destroy all his undertakings. A rich peasant hides from the master that he has money; An impoverished multi-family peasant prefers to huddle in a dilapidated hut rather than move to a stone house built by a landowner.

Nekhlyudov fought for more than a year, but his good intentions ended in complete failure. “Have my men become richer?” - the young man thinks, and a feeling of shame and powerlessness seizes him.

The writer exposed the abyss that separates the landowner and his serfs. The story convinced the reader of the impossibility of somehow improving the life of the peasants under the conditions of the feudal system. But what way will save the people from impoverishment and extinction? How to correct the main evil of Russian life, with which the kind and selfless Nekhlyudov tried in vain to cope? The writer, capable, according to Chernyshevsky, of moving into the soul of a peasant and a soldier, stood for the immediate abolition of serfdom, but not by revolutionary means. He clearly saw the growth of the peasant revolution, with deep sympathy for the people and with anxiety for the fate of the nobility spoke of the need to abolish slavery in Russia, but considered the moral improvement of people the only way to reorganize society. Therefore, Tolstoy, a fearless accuser who angrily told the truth about the vanity and inhumanity of the ruling circles, about the poverty and lack of rights of the peasantry, wrote to Nekrasov that it was bad to be “outraged, bilious, evil”, and preached the theory of universal love.

The inconsistency of Tolstoy's social and literary position, his break with Sovremennik, on the one hand, and his disappointment in liberal illusions, on the other hand, all this caused a deep crisis in the mind of the writer. In the second half of the 1950s, his creative activity weakened.

In 1857 Tolstoy traveled abroad to France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. The impressions received abroad caused him to become disillusioned with bourgeois democracy, morality, and civilization. In the Swiss city of Lucerne, Tolstoy saw how “in front of the hotel where the richest people stay, a wandering beggar singer sang songs and played the guitar for half an hour. About a hundred people listened to him. The singer three times asked everyone to give him something. Not a single person gave him anything, and many laughed at him.”

This episode is the basis of the story "Lucerne". Tolstoy indignantly denounces the inhumanity of the so-called "civilized" society.

But the accusatory power of the story is opposed by Tolstoy's appeal to the "infallible leader" - the "universal spirit", to the one who sees everything, knows everything and, perhaps, made a poor singer without a penny in his pocket happier than his rich offenders.

Tolstoy's works of the late 50s - the stories "Albert", "Three Deaths", the novel "Family Happiness" - were rather coldly received. They did not testify to the decline of the writer's talent, but clearly indicated that he was at a crossroads.

Tolstoy is ready to cross out everything that came out from under his pen,

he doubts the social significance of his literary work. But the writer could not help looking for other forms of social activity. During 1859-1862, Tolstoy opened 21 schools for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana and its environs. He is passionate about teaching. “I feel so satisfied and happy as never before,” he writes, “and only because I work from morning to evening, and the work is the very one that I love.” Public education, which is not in the hands of the government, but in the hands of honest, enlightened people, the writer considers the most important means of improving the social structure. In an effort to deeply master the school business, Tolstoy studied its production in Russia and abroad.

During the second trip abroad, he met and became close friends with Herzen. The views of the two great writers were largely different, and above all in relation to the main issue of the era - the fate of the peasantry. But they were bound by deep mutual respect and, moreover, love for each other, ardent patriotism, an irreconcilable attitude towards bourgeois civilization, towards the social system that existed in Russia, faith in the future of Russia.

Lev Nikolaevich returned from abroad shortly after the "liberation" of the peasants. Like the revolutionary democrats, he sharply negatively assessed the reform, seeing that it did not satisfy the people's aspirations. “This is completely useless chatter,” he wrote to Herzen. However, Tolstoy even now remained an opponent of revolutionary methods of struggle.

The implementation of the reforms on the ground largely depended, according to Tolstoy, on the arbitrariness of the "terrible, rude and cruel" nobility. The writer agreed to become a mediator in order to protect the interests of the people. In this field, Tolstoy earned the love of the peasants and aroused the indignation of the nobles. The landowners threatened him with reprisals, complained to the authorities, demanded that he be removed from the case. The tsarist government put Tolstoy under secret surveillance. A search was carried out in Yasnaya Polyana, which caused the writer's angry protest against "arbitrariness, violence and injustice."

The duties of a mediator gave Tolstoy an opportunity to get even closer to the life of the people in one of the most difficult periods of its history. Perhaps this helped Tolstoy to return to artistic creativity. “Now I am a writer with all the strength of my soul, and I write and think, as I have never written and thought before,” he admitted in one of his letters. .

In 1862, Tolstoy completed the story "The Cossacks", begun in 1852 in the Caucasus and based on the impressions of Caucasian life.

Happy personal circumstances also contributed to the rise of creative forces: in September 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya Andreevna Bers, the daughter of a famous Moscow doctor. Tolstoy is captured by the most important questions of the era: about the ways of development of Russia, about the fate of the people, about its role in history, about the relationship between the people and the nobility, about the role of the individual in history. He turns to the study of the great historical events of the beginning of the century. The Patriotic War of 1812 and the Decembrist uprising were seen by Tolstoy and his advanced contemporaries as the origins of the subsequent social development of Russia.

Based on the experience of Pushkin (Peter the Great's Moor, Boris Godunov, The Captain's Daughter), Tolstoy is looking for a new form of historical narrative.

The contours of the new work were not immediately determined. Initially, a novel was conceived about a Decembrist returning in 1856 from Siberia as an old white as a harrier and "trying on his strict and somewhat ideal look to the new Russia." Here is the story of the writer himself about the further development of this idea: “Involuntarily from the present" I moved on to 1825, the era of the errors and misfortunes of my hero, and left what I had begun. But even in 1825 my hero was already a mature, family man. To understand him, I had to go back to his youth, and his youth coincided with the glorious for Russia era of 1812. Another time I abandoned what I had begun and began to write from the time of 1812, whose smell and sound are still audible and dear to us ... Between those semi-historical, semi-social, semi-fictional great characters and faces of a great era, the personality of my hero receded into the background, and young and old people, and men and women of that time, came to the fore, with equal interest to me. perhaps it will seem strange ... I was ashamed to write about our triumph in the fight against Bonaparte France, without describing our failures and our shame ... If the reason for our triumph was not accidental, but lay in the essence of the character of the Russian people and troops, then this character should have been express itself even more clearly in an era of setbacks and defeats.

So, having returned from 1856 to 1805, from now on I intend to lead not one, but many of my heroines and heroes through the historical events of 1805, 1807, 1812, 1825 and 1856.

As work on the novel, its historical framework narrowed, the content was more clearly defined. The people as the bearer of spiritual values ​​occupied an increasing place in Tolstoy's new work. The depiction of a specific historical epoch acquired universal significance, because the writer's thoughts about the role of the individual and the masses in the historical process, about man and society, "about war and peace - these are thoughts about the historical paths and destinies of all mankind. The development of events in his novel is determined by the movement of history itself, all actors are involved in the historical flow, individual private destinies are intertwined with the destinies of the people, the author's philosophical reflections are combined with family chronicles, nature paintings, battle scenes. And all this diverse, huge material is connected by a single thought, which the writer defined as “folk thought”. To reveal the national significance of the Patriotic War of 1812, to show the role of the masses and individuals in the course of historical events, to understand and capture the traits of the national character of a great people, a character that manifested itself with particular force in one of the most acute historical moments - this is what Tolstoy strove for.

The work, which received the name "War and Peace" only at the last stage of the work, was the result of six years of continuous and intense work (1863-1869), "the author's insane effort", in the words of Tolstoy himself.

The surviving draft versions testify to this gigantic work. Suffice it to say that the text of the novel was rewritten seven times. The writer studied the works of historians, memoirs, letters, talked a lot with contemporaries of the events of 1812, traveled to the Borodino field.

The appearance of "War and Peace" made Tolstoy the greatest Russian and world writer (the novel was soon translated into European languages). According to Turgenev, "nothing better has ever been written by anyone." Gorky preserved for us Lenin's statement about Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace:

“- What a block, huh? What a hardened human being! This, my friend, is an artist ... And, you know, what else is amazing? Prior to this count, there was no true peasant in literature ... Who in Europe can be put next to him?

He answered himself:

Someone."

“Everything turned upside down...” Tolstoy in the 70s.

The artistic study of the era of 1805-1820 prompted Tolstoy to go further into the depths of Russian history, to the era of Peter I. Concerned about the problems of contemporary reality, the writer saw in Peter's time "the beginning of everything", "the knot of Russian life."

Tolstoy turned over mountains of historical materials, sketched "many options for the beginning of a future historical novel. At the same time, he worked on an educational book for children -" ABC ", for which he wrote about six hundred articles and stories, including "Bone", "Shark", "Jump", "Prisoner of the Caucasus". Meanwhile, in his mind, starting from 1870, the idea of ​​a new novel was ripening. Its first version was created rapidly - in 50 days of March-April 1873.

However, it took another four years, filled with both pedagogical work and the fight against / hunger in the Samara province, it took an uncountable number of alterations, sometimes driving the author to despair, before the novel "Anna Karenina" became the property of readers. It was completed in 1877.

According to Tolstoy, his new work was written "thanks to the divine Pushkin." Tolstoy's story has been preserved about how he picked up a volume with Pushkin's prose and, "as always (it seems to be the 7th time), re-read everything, unable to tear himself away, and as if reading again." Tolstoy was especially attracted by the unfinished passage "The guests were arriving at the dacha ...". It is about a woman who dared to break the rules of an aristocratic society.

“In order for a work to be good, one must love the main, basic thought in it,” Tolstoy said. “So, in Anna Karenina I love the family thought, in War and Peace I loved the people’s thought, as a result of the war of the 12th year .. ."

The history of kindred noble families - Oblonsky, Shcherbatsky, Karenin, Levin - reflected one of the turning points in the history of Russia.

V. I. Lenin in the article “L. N. Tolstoy and his epoch” (1911) says that “the epoch to which L. Tolstoy belongs, and which was reflected remarkably in relief both in his brilliant works of art and in his teaching, is the epoch after 1861 and before 1905- th yr. V. I. Lenin quotes the words of one of the heroes of "Anna Karenina" - Konstantin Levin, in which it is extremely clearly expressed what the pass of Russian history was for these half a century:

... “Talking about the harvest, hiring workers, etc., which, Levin knew, is usually considered something very low, ... now for Levin seemed only important. “Maybe it didn't matter under serfdom, or it didn't matter in England. In both cases the very conditions are specified; but with us now, when all this has turned upside down and is only just being arranged, the question of how these conditions will fit is the only important question in Russia,” thought Levin. Based on the novel by L. N. Tolstoy, V. I. Lenin characterizes the patterns of the crisis era, “when the entire old system was “turned over” and when the masses, brought up in this old system, absorbed principles, habits, traditions, beliefs with their mother’s milk this system, does not see, and cannot see, what"fitting" new system, which social forces and how exactly it is laid, which social forces capable bring deliverance from the innumerable especially acute disasters characteristic of the epochs of breaking. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy explores this difficult, torturous breakdown mainly at the level of family relationships. But family life in the novel turns out to be inseparable from the life of noble and peasant Russia, where the foundations of serfdom are crumbling and the foundations of the bourgeois system are “fitting in”; during this period, a broad, multifaceted activity of democratic forces unfolds, a powerful struggle is underway in the sphere of ideological, scientific, moral, the foundations of the family are being revised, and the movement for the liberation (emancipation) of women is intensifying. The heroes of the novel live in a society where a decent form is placed above all else, with which everything can be covered: mutual deceit, debauchery, meanness, betrayal. Living, sincere feeling here is wild, out of place, it seems to be directed against the very foundations of this society and therefore is severely condemned. Anna Karenina is trying to escape from this false, soulless world.

The heroine of Tolstoy is one of the most charming images of Russian and world literature. She has a clear mind and a pure heart, children are drawn to her. At a very young age, she was married to the successful statesman Karenin. “They say: a religious, moral, honest, intelligent person,” Anna thinks of her husband, “but they don’t see what I saw. They don’t know how he choked my life for eight years, choked everything that was alive in me ... "

Anna fell in love with Vronsky - fell in love for the first time in her life, deeply, passionately. Anna cannot deceive her husband, as did the “decent women” of her circle, who were not condemned by anyone for this. Divorcing him is also impossible: it means giving up your son. Karenin does not give Seryozha, who loves his mother dearly, out of "high Christian motives." A wall of alienation grows around Anna: "Everyone attacked her, all those who are a hundred times worse than her." The writer draws the death of a family as a result of a social crime, the violence of a sanctimonious, deadened social system over a human personality. Karenin could not resist the influence of "brute force, which was supposed to guide his life in the eyes of the world and prevented him from surrendering to his feeling of love and forgiveness."

The society of bigots and hypocrites mercilessly cracks down on Anna. Tolstoy portrays her torment with amazing force. Serezha's separation from his mother is an irreparable loss for both. This is especially clearly felt in the scene of Anna's meeting with her son, drawn with an amazing, truly magical penetration into the secrets of the human soul. Anna has no friends, no business that could captivate her. In life, she can only love Vronsky. And Anna begins to be tormented by "terrible thoughts about what will happen if he stops loving her." She becomes suspicious, unfair. Between her and a person dear to her settles "an evil spirit of some kind of struggle."

Life becomes unbearable. This living soul comes to a sad conclusion: “Are we not all thrown into the world then only to hate each other and therefore torment ourselves and others?”; “Everything is false, everything is a lie, everything is a lie, everything is evil! ..” Before her death, “the darkness that covered everything for her broke, and life appeared to her for a moment with all her bright past joys ... And the candle by which she read full of worries , of deceit, grief and evil, the book flared up with a brighter light than ever, illuminated for it everything that had previously been in darkness, crackled, began to fade and went out forever ... "

There are many bright pages in the novel: strong and beautiful human feelings are drawn here - the love of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya, their family joys and concerns, the healthy and pure traditions of a peasant family, the entire working peasant world, which attract Levin. But he also feels the fragility of his happiness, he is sometimes overcome by despair from the spectacle of the disorder of the world and from his own impotence.

The novel awakens the idea that in a society based on inhumanity, lies and hypocrisy, the family is under the eternal threat of death. "

The analysis of family relations in the novel becomes an analysis of the entire social structure.

A. A. Fet said excellently about this. “And I suppose they all sense that this novel is a strict, incorruptible judgment of our entire system of life ... They sense that there is an eye above them, armed differently than their blind-born peepers. What seems to them undeniable, honest, good, elegant, enviable, turns out to be stupid, rude, meaningless and ridiculous.

"Lawyer of 100 million agricultural people". Tolstoy in the 80-900s.

The writer is relentlessly haunted by the thought of the tragic situation in Russia: “Crowded Siberia, prisons, war, gallows, poverty of the people, blasphemy, greed and cruelty of the authorities ...” Tolstoy 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 people's anger, 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 Petrine era, interrupted by the writing of Anna Karenina. This work brings him back to the theme of Decembrism, which led the writer to War and Peace in the 1960s. At the end of the 70s, both plans merged into one - truly colossal: Tolstoy conceived an epic that was supposed to cover a whole century, from the time of Peter to the uprising of the Decembrists. This idea remained in outline. The historical research of the writer 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 the starving peasants, visits courts and prisons, standing up for the innocently convicted.

The participation of the writer in the life of the people was also manifested in his pedagogical activity. She became especially active in the 1970s. Tolstoy, he said, wants education for the people in order to save the sinking Pushkins and Lomonosovs, who "swarm in every school."

In the early 1980s, Tolstoy participated in the All-Russian population census. He takes over the work in the so-called "Rzhanovsky fortress" - a Moscow brothel of "the most terrible 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 the sympathy of society for these unfortunate people, that it is possible to achieve "love communication" between the rich and the poor, and the whole point is only that the rich understand the need to live "in a divine way."

But at every step Tolstoy sees something else: the ruling classes commit any crimes in order to keep their power, their wealth. This is how Tolstoy imagines Moscow, where he moved with his family in 1881: “Stink, stones, luxury, poverty. Depravity. The villains who robbed the people gathered, recruited soldiers, judges to guard their orgy, "and feast."

Tolstoy perceives all this horror so keenly that he

his own material well-being begins to seem unacceptable. He refuses the usual conditions of life, is engaged in physical labor: chopping firewood, carrying water. “It is worth entering a working housing - the soul blossoms,” Tolstoy writes in his diary. And at home he does not find a place for himself. "Boring. Hard. Idleness. Fat… hard, hard. There is no light. More often than not, death beckons. Records 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 a retribution for the oppression of the people and the atrocities of the masters, but does not believe that it is a saving way out for Russia.

Where is the salvation? This question becomes more and more painful for the writer. It seems to him that evil, violence cannot be eradicated with the help of violence, that only the unity of people in the spirit of the precepts of ancient Christianity can save Russia and mankind. He proclaims the principle of "non-resistance to evil by violence." “... I now have one desire in life,” Tolstoy writes, “it’s not to upset anyone, not to offend, not to do anything unpleasant to anyone - the executioner, the usurer, but try to love them.”

At the same time, the writer sees that executioners and usurers are unyielding to the preaching of love. “The need for denunciation is getting stronger and stronger,” admits Tolstoy. And he denounces furiously and angrily the inhumanity of the government, the hypocrisy of the church, the idleness and depravity of the ruling classes.

In the early 1980s, a long-awaited turning point in Tolstoy's worldview came to an end.

In his "Confession" (1879-1882), Tolstoy writes: "I have renounced the life of our circle." The writer condemns all his previous activities and even participation in the defense of Sevastopol. All this seems to him now a manifestation of vanity, pride, greed, which are characteristic of "masters." Tolstoy speaks of his desire to live the life of the working people, to believe in their faith. He thinks that for this you need to "renounce all the pleasures of life, work, humble yourself, endure and be merciful."

In the works of the writer, the indignation and protest of the broadest masses, suffering from economic and political lawlessness, finds expression.

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, collapsed with passionate criticism of all modern state, church, social, economic systems based on the enslavement of the masses, on their poverty, on the ruin of the peasants and small farmers in general, on violence and hypocrisy, which permeate all modern life from top to bottom.

Tolstoy's ideological searches did not stop until the last day of his life. But no matter how his views develop further, the defense of the interests of the many millions of peasant masses remains their basis. And when the first revolutionary storm raged in Russia, Tolstoy wrote: “In this whole revolution I am in the rank of ... a lawyer of 100 million agricultural people” (1905).

The worldview of Tolstoy, who, according to Lenin, became the first "muzhik in literature", found expression in many of his works written in the 80s-90s and 900s: in stories, plays, articles, in the last of his novels - "Resurrection". “No matter how hard people tried, having gathered in one small place several hundred thousand, to disfigure the land on which they huddled, no matter how they stoned the earth so that nothing would grow on it, no matter how they cleaned off any breaking grass, no matter how they smoked with coal and oil, no matter how they pruned the trees and drove out all the animals and birds, - spring was spring even in the city. The sun warmed, the grass, reviving, grew and turned green wherever they scraped it 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 puffed out bursting buds; jackdaws, sparrows and doves were already happily preparing their nests in the spring, and flies were buzzing along the walls, warmed by the sun. Plants, and birds, and insects, and children were cheerful. But people - big, adult people - did not stop deceiving and torturing themselves and each other. People believed that sacred and important is not this spring morning, not this beauty of the world of God, given for the benefit of all beings, - beauty, conducive to peace, harmony and love, but sacred and important is what they themselves invented in order to rule over each other. friend."

This is how Leo 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 say 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?.. Here everything merged together: epic and lyrical beginnings, description and sermon, narration of events and expression of the author's feelings.

Such a fusion is characteristic of the entire work. The image of two human destinies is its basis. Prince Nekhlyudov, being a juror in court, recognizes in the defendant, accused of murder, 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 both of them from death, contributes to the resurrection of the truly human principle in their souls.

Katyusha is innocently convicted. Nekhlyudov tries to alleviate her plight. At first, Katyusha is hostile towards him. She does not want and cannot forgive the person who killed her, she believes that the motives that prompt Nekhlyudov to take care of her fate are selfish. “You delighted in me in this life, but you want to be saved by me in the next world!” she throws angry words in Nekhlyudov's face. But as the soul is resurrected, the former feeling of love is also reborn. And Nekhlyudov is changing before Katyusha's eyes. He follows her to Siberia, 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 link his fate with hard labor. Katyusha finds a friend - the revolutionary Simonson.

The renewal of the human soul is shown as a natural and beautiful process, similar to the revival of nature in spring. The 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 regains faith in man, in truth, in goodness.

Gradually recognizing the life of the oppressed, the destitute, he begins to distinguish good from evil and Nekhlyuds. In the first chapters of the novel, the author often draws his image in satirical tones. But as the hero of the Resurrection moves away from the privileged circle, the voice of the author and his voice draw closer, and more and more accusatory speeches sound in the mouth of Nekhlyudov.

So the main characters of the novel go from a moral fall to a spiritual rebirth.

Not in a single work of Tolstoy with such merciless force, with such anger and pain, with such irreconcilable hatred, did the very essence of the lawlessness, lies and meanness of class society be revealed. Tolstoy draws a soulless, blind bureaucratic machine that crushes living people.

Here is one of the "engines" of this machine - the old General Baron Kriegsmuth. As a result of the execution of his instructions, given "in the name of the Sovereign Emperor", political prisoners are dying. Their death does not touch the conscience of the general, since the man in him died long ago.

“Nekhlyudov listened to his hoarse old voice, looked at these ossified members, at the dead 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 polyphonic murder, and understood that it is useless to object, to explain to him the meaning of his words.

Exposing the criminality of his contemporary society, Tolstoy often refers to one expressive detail, which, repeated many times, draws the reader's attention to the very essence of the social phenomenon. Such is the image of the “bloodless child in a patchwork skufe” that Nekhlyudov sees in the countryside. “This child kept smiling strangely all over his old face and kept moving his tensely twisted thumbs. Nekhlyudov knew that it was a smile of suffering.

A thoughtful artist seeks to understand those who have declared open war on a vicious society, who go to hard labor for their beliefs. The author ranks the revolutionaries among the people who "stand morally above the average level of society", calls them the best people. Revolutionaries arouse Nekhlyudov's cordial disposition, and according to Katyusha, "such miraculous people ... she not only did not know, but could not imagine. “She very easily and without effort understood the motives that guided these people, and, as a person from the people, she fully sympathized with them. She understood that these people were going for the people, against the masters; and the fact that these people themselves were masters and sacrificed their advantages, freedom and life for the people, made her especially value these people and admire them.

In the assessment of the revolutionaries, given from the point of view of Katyusha, it is not difficult to catch the author's attitude towards them. The images of Maria Pavlovna, Kryltsov, Simonson are charming. The only exception is Novodvor-ditch, who claims to be the leader, treats the people with contempt and is confident in his infallibility. This man brought into the revolutionary milieu that reverence for form, for dead dogmas to the detriment of the interests of living people, which reigned in the bureaucratic

circles. But it is not Novodvorov who determines the moral character of the revolutionaries. Despite deep ideological differences with them, Tolstoy could not but appreciate their moral feat.

However, Tolstoy still rejects the very principle of the violent overthrow of the rotten social order. In Resurrection, not only the strength of the great realist, but also the tragic contradictions of his passionate search, were reflected.

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 way not only to defeat him, but even to understand how to defeat him " . The conclusion that Nekhlyudov finds unexpectedly for the reader and for himself after everything he has seen and experienced does not follow from the pictures of life that passed before his eyes. This way out was suggested by the book that ended up in the hands of Nekhlyudov - the Gospel. He comes to the conclusion that "the only and indisputable means of salvation from that terrible evil from which people suffer is to admit oneself always 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 forever, everyone, forgive an infinite number of times, because there are no people who would not be guilty themselves ...”

Who to forgive? Baron Kriegsmuth? Are the victims as guilty as the executioners? And did humility ever save the oppressed?

"Make the whole world listen!" Rejecting revolutionary methods of struggle, Tolstoy continues to fight with words. He raises his voice in defense of the people when, after the revolution of 1905, peasant riots end in mass executions and massacres. He stigmatizes the executioners-punishers in his famous article "I can not be silent" (1908), where he calls the participants in the liberation movement "the best estate of the Russian people."

In the mind of Tolstoy there is a tense comprehension of the events of the first Russian revolution. In 1907-1909 he conceived and started several works about revolutionaries. In the story “Who are the killers? Pavel Kudryash ”(it remained unfinished) reveals the history of the spiritual formation of a peasant guy - smart, talented, hardworking. Pavel goes to the city, enters the factory, inquisitively thinks about the causes of national disasters, becomes a member of the "union of workers." With deep sympathy, images of other revolutionaries, Pavel's comrades, are sketched in the story. In one of these images - the professional revolutionary Antipatrov, one can notice similarities with Chernyshevsky and his heroes - Lopukhov, Rakhmetov. Without changing his views on the revolutionary path of social reorganization, Tolstoy thinks and writes about revolutionary heroes with ever greater understanding and sympathy; their hatred of tsarism and their selfless striving for the liberation of the people are close to him. Tolstoy is ready to share the fate of those revolutionaries who are dealt with by the tsarist executioners, he is ready to have the soapy rope tightened on his “old throat”.

The great artist continues to live "forever in anxiety and excitement." To give good to people, to save them from suffering - this is what, according to Tolstoy, leads the writer, thinker and keeps him in constant tension: how to manage to do this, because death can interfere ... And he is in a hurry. Along with works of art that testify to the ever-growing accusatory power of Tolstoy's genius (After the Ball, 1903, Hadji Murat, 1896-1905, etc.), dozens of articles appear that deal blows to the autocracy, the church, police arbitrariness, expose hypocrisy and depravity of the ruling classes.

The reactionaries followed Tolstoy's activities with impotent fury: they could not force him to remain silent. New works of the great writer were forbidden. The Holy Synod excommunicated Tolstoy from the church, and every year the priests in churches anathematized him "on a par with" the rebels Stenka Razin and Emelka Pugachev.

Tolstoy regarded government and church persecution and the attacks of the corrupt press with calm contempt. Journalist A. S. Suvorin wrote in his diary: “We have two kings: Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which of them is stronger? Nicholas II cannot do anything with Tolstoy, cannot shake his throne, while Tolstoy undoubtedly shakes the throne of Nicholas ... "

Progressive people of Russia and many countries of the world are drawn to Tolstoy as an artist, thinker, teacher, public figure. Yasnaya Polyana and the Moscow house of Tolstoy become centers where people of different social strata, different ages, different professions go in an endless stream. In a conversation with a great man, they hope to resolve the questions that torment them: how should one live? How to get rid of serious doubts? Where to look for the truth? How to help a suffering person?

Who hasn't visited Tolstoy's house! Among its visitors, along with many of its unknown guests, we will meet the names of Turgenev, Chekhov, Korolenko, Gorky, Stasov, Repin, Chaliapin and many, many others. The greatest artists of the West - Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Galsworthy, Shaw - treated Tolstoy with love and admiration. The American writer Theodore Dreiser said that it was Tolstoy's works that helped him find his calling: “How wonderful it would be to become a writer. If only you could write like Tolstoy and make the whole world listen!” This is said very accurately: the world was waiting for each new word of the brilliant Russian writer as a word of truth, answering the most important questions of our time. “It was too little for us to admire the work of Tolstoy,” said the great French writer Romain Rolland, “we lived by it, it was ours. Ours - with its burning vitality, its youthfulness of the heart ... "

The writer's fame also grew among the new, ever wider circles of readers - among the working people. “We, people of hard work and hard lot, sons of the same unfortunate mother with you, send you greetings, honoring in your person a national genius, a great artist, a glorious and tireless seeker of truth,” the St. Petersburg workers wrote to Tolstoy on his eightieth birthday. .

Towards the end of his life, the discord in his soul became more and more painful for the writer: having broken with the views of the privileged classes, he continued to live in the atmosphere of a manor house, a landowner's estate, his family owned the land. Tolstoy himself renounced the rights to the estate, and renounced the ownership of his works. But the consciousness of even relative well-being amid the hopeless poverty of the people was unbearable for him. Coming from a neighboring village, where again, for the thousandth time, he saw human grief - an 80-year-old old man working to exhaustion, a peasant woman whose husband is frozen, a child dying of hunger, Tolstoy writes: "I scream in pain" - and asks for death. "Confused, stuck, I hate myself and my life."

More than once in the 1980s Tolstoy tried to leave home, but felt sorry for his wife and children. On October 28, 1910, the eighty-two-year-old writer nevertheless found the strength to leave Yasnaya Polyana. He hoped to live in a natural working environment, gain spiritual support, and, perhaps, before the end, to better understand himself and the world. In a farewell letter, Tolstoy addressed his wife: "... understand and believe that I could not have done otherwise ... I thank you for your honest 48-year life with me and ask you to forgive me for everything that I was guilty of before you."

On the way, Tolstoy fell ill with pneumonia. I had to stop at the Astapovo station of the Ryazan railway (now the Leo Tolstoy station). For a week this remote place was truly the center of the spiritual interests of the world. There, in the house of the head of the station, Tolstoy was dying. Millions of people focused their thoughts and hopes on how to prolong his life. And the tsarist government at that time urgently transferred gendarmes and troops to Astapovo. Among the bulletins about Tolstoy's state of health, alarming inquiries from all over the Earth, the railway telegraph also transmitted such orders: "Arrive in Astapovo with weapons and cartridges ..."

In the article “The Beginning of the Demonstrations”, V. I. Lenin wrote: “The death of Leo Tolstoy causes - for the first time after a long break - street demonstrations with the participation of mainly students, but partly also of workers.”

A crowd of thousands accompanied the coffin of the writer to Yasnaya Polyana.

According to Tolstoy's long expressed desire, he is buried where the "green stick" once hid its great secret - on the edge of a ravine in the Yasnaya Polyana forest Stary Zakaz.

“The ideal of ant brothers clinging lovingly to each other,” Tolstoy wrote, recalling his childhood at the end of his life, “remained the same for me. And how I then believed that there is that green

a stick on which is written what should destroy all evil in people and give them great good, so I believe now that this truth exists and that it will be revealed to people and give them what it promises.

The creative heritage of Tolstoy" is the most valuable asset of Russian and universal culture, necessary for every person for his spiritual development. Gorky said about Tolstoy:

“For 60 years he walked around Russia, looked everywhere; to the village, to the village school, to the Vyazemsky Lavra and abroad, to prisons, stages, to the cabinets of ministers, to the office of governors, to huts, to inns and to the living rooms of aristocratic ladies.

Tolstoy is deeply national, he embodies in his soul with amazing fullness 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 - radically deny his religious philosophy ...

This man did a truly great deed: he gave a summary of what he had experienced over a century, and gave it with amazing truthfulness, strength and beauty.

List of used literature:

Lenin V. I. Leo Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian revolution; L. N. Tolstoy; L. N. Tolstoy and the modern labor movement; Tolstoy and the proletarian struggle; L. N. Tolstoy and his era.

Gorky M. Leo Tolstoy.

L. N. Tolstoy in Russian criticism: Collection of articles. - M., 1962.

L. N. Tolstoy in the memoirs of contemporaries: In 2 volumes - M., 1960.

L. N. Tolstoy and his relatives. - M., 1986.

Bocharov S. G. Roman L. N. Tolstoy "War and Peace". - 4th ed. - M., - 1987.

Gromov P. P. On the style of Leo Tolstoy: "Dialectics of the Soul" in "War and Peace". - L., 1977.

Dolinina N. Through the pages of "War and Peace" - L., 1978.

Zhislina S. S. Good light from afar. Non-fictional stories about L. N. Tolstoy. - M., 1978.

Interviews and conversations with Leo Tolstoy. - M., 1986.

Kandiev B.I. The epic novel by L.N. Tolstoy “War and Peace”. Comment.-M., 1967.

Kamyanov V. I. The poetic world of the epic. - M., 1978.

Kuzminskaya T. A. My life at home and in Yasnaya Polyana: Memoirs.-M., 1986.

Lom at new K. N. Lenin reads Tolstoy. - M., 1980.

Lomunov K-N. Leo Tolstoy in the modern world. - M., 1975.

M a and m and n E. A. Leo Tolstoy: The Way of the Writer. - M., 1978.

M y l e v a T. L. “War and Peace” Abroad: Translations. Criticism. Influence.-M., 1978.

Popovkin A., Loshch and n N., Arkhangelskaya T. L. N. Tolstoy in portraits, illustrations and documents. - M., 1961.

Chicherin A. V. The emergence of the epic novel. - 2nd ed. - M., 1975.

Shklovsky V. Leo Tolstoy. - 2nd ed. - M., 1967 (series "Life of Remarkable People").