Leo Tolstoy: History, Realism, and Russian Literary Reform

Introduction: Tolstoy's Russia

During Leo Tolstoy's lifetime (1828–1910), Russia and Europe underwent a number of significant political and intellectual changes. Writing evolved from Romanticism to Realism during this period. As the term "realism" implies, realistic novelists like Tolstoy focused on observation and close attention to detail. In Russia, the czars retained absolute power by resisting the political and social changes that Western European countries were experiencing. Intellectuals, including Tolstoy, led the effort toward reform, but those efforts met with considerable resistance until the twentieth century. For writers, the retention of power by the czars meant the repression of literature, which had a severe impact on realistic writers like Tolstoy who presented a truthful picture of political and social conditions.

Nicholas I, who ruled until 1855, was particularly repressive. In spite of his conservatism, Russian literature experienced a tremendous upsurge during his reign and that of his son, Alexander II. In addition to Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky contributed significantly to a literary "golden age" in Russia. In his later years, Tolstoy's religious conversion came to play an all-encompassing role in his life and work.

In the early years of Tolstoy's writing career, Czar Nicholas I ruled Russia with a tight grip on power. He tolerated no dissent and employed secret police to ensure that his policies were obeyed. The hallmarks of his philosophy were the practice of state religion, the supremacy of the state, and total dedication to the czar. In such an environment, one might expect literature to suffer. However, in spite of Nicholas's best efforts, literature flourished during his reign. Ironically, writers like Tolstoy — born into the gentry — sought to undermine the very Russian institutions that had privileged them.

Czarist Repression and the Rise of Russian Realism

As noted above, realism marked the period when Tolstoy wrote his most famous novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Realism entailed a dedication to accurately representing real life and real people — subjects that Nicholas had no interest in seeing explored. These books exposed the inadequacies of Russian life under the czars' strict leadership. The excessive detail of realistic writing successfully highlighted the specific, the individual, and the particular, as opposed to the general and the collective.

Nicholas's preoccupation with maintaining absolute power led him to support other countries' efforts to suppress revolution. This proved to be a costly approach and eventually contributed to peasant revolts. Tolstoy's early efforts to enlighten peasants and encourage protest had been unsuccessful prior to Nicholas's ill-advised military campaigns, yet this environment did not prevent Tolstoy from expressing his feelings about the condition of peasants in Russia.

Although realism was a reaction to Romanticism, some Romantic elements influenced Tolstoy's worldview and his work. Like the Romantics, Tolstoy saw the over-civilized man as unnatural — someone who had drifted far from the human ideal. By contrast, the man closest to nature was the natural man, who should be considered far closer to that ideal. The over-civilized man is driven by materialistic and self-conscious motives, while the natural man operates in an unconscious, instinctive environment. The over-civilized man resembles the selfish, over-privileged rich of the West; the natural man represents all that is noble in humanity.

Romanticism, the Natural Man, and Anarchic Individualism

Tolstoy's work focused on the psychological and broke down the most complex behavior into small, comprehensible units. His interest in the natural man and his distaste for the institutions that occupy the unnatural man create a version of anarchism in which all imposed structure is dissolved. This approach also implies that Tolstoy's writing does not revolve primarily around Russian political issues of the day; rather, all issues develop at the individual psychological level, not at the general societal level. Another implication of Tolstoy's focus on the individual is his emphasis on clean, clear writing that made his work accessible to the middle class. At the same time, a great division existed between Russians who strove to emulate Western culture and those who felt that Russia had its own unique qualities — the latter group being the Slavophiles.

The problems associated with the serf economic system grew increasingly difficult to ignore. Nicholas I recognized the fragile condition of serfdom yet made no moves to alleviate the problem. At the beginning of his reign, Alexander II began addressing the issue by appointing committees to recommend what changes made sense. The Russian nobility stood in the way of meaningful reform, and only minimal changes occurred. The lack of real progress stimulated protest among intellectuals such as Tolstoy.

Tolstoy's acquaintance with peasants serving in the army revealed the dual nature of his personality. In some of his books he presented peasants as hard-working people, while in others he characterized them as lacking in trustworthiness. Regardless of this ambivalence, Tolstoy constantly refined his skills of observation, a discipline that would eventually enable him to translate reality into the words of his novels with remarkable precision.