Many conflicts stem from human complexes. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was filled with complexes that made him go against public opinion, church, state. Oddly enough, this behavior helped him become a person whose opinion was listened to by the whole of Russia.
The roots of the Tolstoy counts are lost somewhere in the XIV century. The rise of the family began three centuries later, thanks to the diplomat Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy. Having managed to deceive the fugitive Tsarevich Alexei back to his homeland, he was awarded the title of count, joining the ranks of the aristocracy. Since then, the Tolstoy have held senior positions - they were ministers, generals, governors.
Looking for meaning
The classic's grandfather, Ilya Andreevich, was the governor of Kazan, but was caught stealing state funds and died while under investigation. Lev Nikolaevich later borrowed some of his features, portraying in War and Peace the touching and impractical Count Rostov.
This story ruined the career of the writer's father, Nikolai Ilyich, who left the guards and switched to sorting out the complicated financial affairs of the family. In which, however, he also did not achieve much success. He died when Leo was barely nine years old. His mother died of childbirth fever when he was two years old.
The boy was left to the guardians and stupid tutors, which, of course, formed a complex of abandonment in him. However, he never encountered serious material difficulties. For example, once I went to the Bashkir village of Karalik to be treated for depression with kumys. It worked: the depression passed, and the koumiss and nature liked it so much that the count bought himself a property in the local area.
But that was later, when he became a family man. In his youth, Count Tolstoy led the usual way of life for the "golden youth" with cards, drinking and driving around brothels. Contemporaries noted that he wanted to shine in society, but lacked secular gloss. The tightness and rather ordinary appearance interfered. But he periodically expressed paradoxical and scandalous judgments, as if demonstrating a disregard for others. At the same time, he was sensitive to other people's judgments in his address.
Promotional video:
The desire to bring benefit to society was present at the level of abstract wishes. To enter the service, for example, one had to get some kind of education besides home. And Lev Nikolaevich chose the easiest option, becoming a student at Moscow University. But he could not complete the training course.
Having got into debt and realizing the senselessness of such an existence, Lev Nikolaevich went to the Caucasus. Without a completed university education, he received the rank of cadet, which made it possible to learn about the war not from the headquarters, but directly.
Scandalous compositions
In the absence of social entertainment, Tolstoy intelligently filled his leisure time with literary experiments. The story Childhood, which he sent to the Sovremennik magazine, aroused a positive response from Nekrasov.
With the outbreak of the Crimean War, Tolstoy achieved transfer to the Danube army, and then ended up on the bastions of Sevastopol. In between battles, he contrived to write frontline essays, which compiled the collection "Sevastopol Stories." After reading them, Alexander II ordered to take care of the talented officer.
The royal attention ensured that if the count had remained in military service, his career would have gone smoothly enough. But Tolstoy unexpectedly tried himself in the poetic field. He composed a soldier's song, to the tune of those that were composed by order of the military command to raise the spirits of the personnel. But she was saturated with bitter sarcasm about the mediocre lost battle on the Black River:
As the fourth number
We were not easy to
take Mountains to select
Several big bosses were offended in her. Since the song became widespread in the then "samizdat", Tolstoy realized that he had nothing to catch in the army. And, having retired, he went abroad.
Europe predictably disappointed him with lack of spirituality. So much the better he appreciated Russia, where he felt in demand and where he successfully blended in Sovremennik, in the company of Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev.
At one time, Tolstoy was thinking of marrying a peasant woman, but in the end, in 1862, he tied the knot of Hymeneus with an ordinary but charming Sofia Andreevna Bers.
Real fame came to him in the late 1860s with the publication of War and Peace. The later Anna Karenina cemented its fame, but added an aura of scandalousness to it, since the topic itself was also scandalous.
Letters to the Emperor
The adultery of the wife of a high-ranking official was unleashed against the backdrop of the desire that swept Russian society to rescue the "Slavic brothers" from the Turkish yoke. Tolstoy did not like the hurray-patriotic campaign, because everything that came from the state was, in his opinion, vicious, artificial, deceitful and "contrary to nature."
Russia began to save the “brothers” in 1877, and that same year Tolstoy called the year of his spiritual break. Outwardly, this change was almost not reflected in the diaries of Sofya Andreevna, who only records that Lyovushka is often thoughtful and silent, hunts a lot and once hit his head painfully on a tree. And Tolstoy wrote his "Confession", which is considered the first work that formed the basis of a new religious and philosophical doctrine - "Tolstoyism".
Lev Nikolaevich moved away from Christianity, in which he was annoyed by the external ritualism, which led him away from the main thing - the search for the meaning of life. First, he stopped observing the fast, defiantly eating meatballs, then he began to speak more and more maliciously about the clergy.
In parallel, his skepticism about the state grew. Back in 1866, he had a chance to take part in a field-military court organized in the Moscow infantry regiment, which was quartered not far from the Yasnaya Polyana estate. The accused clerk Vasily Shabunin in a drunken state hit the officer, for which he was sentenced to death. After this incident, Tolstoy viewed the state as an external force hostile to man.
In 1881, the People's Will killed Alexander II, and Tolstoy wrote a letter to the new emperor Alexander III calling for the abolition of the death sentence imposed on the terrorists. After all, if neither hard labor nor the gallows can calm the revolutionaries, why not try to re-educate them with mercy? This is how the idea of non-resistance to evil by violence was born …
The main ideologist of the empire, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, did not pass this letter to the sovereign. Moreover, the emperor assured that he was not going to pardon the criminals under any circumstances. Lev Nikolaevich did not expect anything else. But his frustration with the system only intensified. Now he himself formed public opinion and was sure that even the most scandalous judgments would not ridicule him, but only respectfully challenge.
In 1890, in Optina Pustyn, he discussed with Konstantin Leontyev about the Orthodox Church, and Leontiev issued a verdict: "You are hopeless." And then he jokingly threatened to denounce. Tolstoy, also jokingly, asked to write a denunciation, since, they say, he dreams of suffering for his beliefs. Not wait.
Definition of the Synod
In 1891 the Kreutzer Sonata was published, where a husband, exhausted by jealousy, killed his beautiful wife. Filled with puritanical discourses on sexual themes, the work looked scandalous. But both Alexander III and Pobedonostsev appreciated his artistic merit, showed open-mindedness, and the story was published.
Tolstoy continued to utter new theses of his teaching, borrowing something from Confucianism, something from Buddhism, something from Taoism, something from Quakerism. The main idea is that a person should not pursue material goods. Instead, one should take care of the soul, communicate with God directly (without intermediaries in the face of the official church), and not resort to violence. From the ban on killing, the count came to vegetarianism, which especially impressed his contemporaries. Although the transition from meat cutlets to rice was, of course, not the most important thing in his teaching.
Communities of Tolstoyans arose everywhere, up to North America, India, Japan. They sometimes reformatted from other pre-existing sects. For example, the Dukhobors, impressed by Tolstoy's appeals, refused to perform military service. To help them move to Canada, Tolstoy agreed to donate part of the royalties from the highly publicized Resurrection novel, in one of which he sarcastically ridiculed the main Christian sacrament - the sacrament.
This was the last straw that overflowed the patience of Orthodox hierarchs. On February 22, 1901, the "Determination and Message of the Holy Synod on Count Leo Tolstoy" was issued. It said that "the Church does not consider him a member and cannot count him until he repent and restores his communion with her."
In fact, this was not an excommunication. The Church only stated that it could not regard Tolstoy as its adept. Moreover, at the end it was said that prayers would be offered up for the salvation of the lost count. However, the public perceived the "Definition …" as an anathema, similar to those proclaimed at the address of Stenka Razin or Hetman Mazepa. Only, unlike the aforementioned characters, the "excommunicated" Leo Tolstoy became even more dearly loved by the people. When Tolstoy, who had not yet known about "The Definition …", went out for a walk along the streets of St. Petersburg, the audience gave him almost an ovation.
And in less than a year, Lev Nikolaevich was elected an honorary academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The world community also reacted - Lev Nikolaevich was nominated for the Nobel Prize. True, he never received it. And when in 1905 he was rejected for the fourth time in a row, he demanded not to nominate him again, since, they say, all this is "vanity and unnecessary". In fact, the count was very proud of himself, and did not consider any of the writers to be his equal. But more and more he entered the role of the spiritual teacher of the nation.
The last journey
Denouncing carnal pleasures as distracting from spiritual development, the count lived a full-fledged intimate life. Teaching that material well-being does not matter, he himself did not give up his possessions in favor of the peasants.
This contrast confused his followers. For example, in 1909, Andrei Marukhin, a Tolstoyan from a community settled in Romania, visited the estate and emasculated himself after the Kreutzer Sonata. After wandering around the estate and seeing how his idol lives, the “Romanian” was in shock, cried and lamented: “My God! How is it? What will I say at home?"
Tolstoy was aware of the falsity of such an existence. In addition, many relatives insisted on reconciliation with the official church. These collisions were complicated by the deteriorating relationship with his wife, who in her behavior more and more resembled a mental patient - she rolled up scandals, threatened with suicide. The count's health was also deteriorating, he felt that he was on the verge of eternity.
Tolstoy had long wanted to cut the knot of his mental anguish by leaving Yasnaya Polyana. And on October 27, 1910, he left, seeing how his wife rummaged in his papers. Having declared himself in the Shamorda monastery with his sister nun Maria Tolstoy, he expressed a desire to bear the "most difficult obedience" on one condition - if only they would not be forced to go to church.
But the wife was already on the trail, and the news of Tolstoy's departure was on the front pages of newspapers. And he continued his journey. Death overtook Tolstoy on November 7 at Astapovo station, leaving open the question: did the count want to be reconciled with the church or decided to be consistent, breaking off relations not only with the church and the state, but also with his loved ones? Conservatives and liberals, believers and atheists, conservatives and revolutionaries preferred to believe in what was closer to them.
Tolstoy's phenomenon lost its relevance soon after his death. As a financially secure person, the count did not understand that most of those around him could not constantly reflect on the meaning of life, while simultaneously solving material problems. But Lenin was well aware of this, who believed that Tolstoyism reflected the spiritual crisis of the whole society, and called Tolstoy "the mirror of the Russian revolution." But the mirror is not the revolution itself. The revolution came later and yet for reasons more material than spiritual.
Dmitry MITYURIN