Saturday 6 October 2018

Tolstoy - A Biography by A.N. Wilson


This biography of Tolstoy   by A.N. Wilson (572 pages)  was first published in 1988.Ninety volumes of  Tolstoy’s work fill the shelves  of the Russian Library. Of all the Russian  novelists who came  after Pushkin , Tolstoy was the greatest. He was born  on August , 1828 into a high , aristocratic family. He served as a soldier in the Crimean war. Tolstoy died on  November 7, 1910.
         Solutions which he  preached to  solve the problems of the nineteenth century were –pacifism, vegetarianism,  reading the gospels and knitting your own clothes. His two greatest achievements were War and Peace , and Anna Karenina. In War and Peace , in telling  the story of Napoleon’s  invasion and retreat from Moscow, Tolstoy had become  a national institution of Russia. War and Peace  is  one of the  great works of literature  of the world.
 “What then must we do?”  is one of Tolstoy’s most impressive  and unforgettable  books.  “What Then Must We Do?”  is an exposure of the  gap between  rich and  poor , and it leaves no reader unaffected. Millions of readers have found in Resurrection    things deeper , both disturbing and consoling  than anything  in Tolstoy’s writings except  War and Peace. Resurrection was more widely disseminated than anything  Tolstoy had previously written . “After the ball” is a great  short story by Tolstoy. The philosopher  Wittgenstein said that “Hadji  Murat”  was one of the few works of Tolstoy  which he could admire.
          It was hard for Tolstoy  to think that  women have any function  in the world  except as breeding stock. Tolstoy used fiction to purge and to sanitise existence .”I could only preach by deeds; and my deeds are bad”. Father Sergius  ( published after  Tolstoy’s death )  was a vivid dissection of  what was wrong with the whole Tolstoyan way of looking at the world. “The Kingdom of God is Within You”  is an infinitely sad book to read. Also , “ all life is a struggle between  the flesh and the spirit  and gradually the  flesh triumphs  over the spirit”, says Tolstoy.  His later advocacy of anarchism , or his  condemnation of  Shakespeare  are  not shared by many.
     Tolstoy remained a compulsive diarist  until last days of his life. In this diary , centre stage was Tolstoy himself. Dickens was his favourite  author and  David Copperfield his favourite  book. He loved Rousseau’s Emily and  The Confessions  equally. He had sweet and sour relations with Turgenev. For seventeen years , there was no contact between them.   However,  Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky  never met.     Tolstoy did not know “  a better book  in all modern literature than  Dostoyevsky’s “The House of the Dead”. He was a smoker of tobacco and had a habit of non-stop tea drinking.
      Tolstoy was not a prophet and he had many shortcomings and many ideas which are unacceptable. But he was a great writer , with tremendous influence all over the world. Wilson has been able to portray  Tolstoy  truly and in an interesting style. Go ahead and read this book , if you are a fan of Tolstoy.