Word: tolstoys
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...Tolstoy's sense of guilt was as great as his appetite, and Biographer Simmons quotes tortured entries in his diary, full of repentance and good resolutions. When he joined the army as a cadet at 23, serving in the Caucasus, he congratulated himself one day on exorcising the evils of vice, especially gambling. In the next entry he recorded that "on the same day I was so carried away that I lost [850 rubles]. Now I shall restrain myself and live prudently. I went to Chervlyonnaya, got drunk there, and slept with a woman. All this is very...
...Literature. At Kazan University, where he had distinguished himself by refusing to be educated, Tolstoy had read the complete works of Rousseau with such adoration that he wore a medallion portrait of him around his neck. In the army he began to write, still under Rousseau's influence and partly in enthusiasm for Laurence Sterne. In 1852 Tolstoy's Childhood, written in camp, excited the reading public in Moscow and won the praise of Turgenev and of Dostoevsky*-then in exile in Siberia...
...firsthand experience of war, which Ernest Hemingway has called indispensable to the greatest writers, awaited Tolstoy at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He commanded a battery of guns at the Fourth Bastion, most exposed point in the city's defenses. Tolstoy wrote the first of his Sevastopol Sketches in a dugout under bombardment. At first he liked the whole thing: "The constant charm of danger, observing the soldiers . . . are so agreeable that I do not wish to leave here. . . ." But before the siege was over he changed his mind. Though he hated physical violence, he beat...
...anguished seer that Tolstoy became after a religious crisis at 50 attracted both fame and followers of a kind that Sonya did not like. She hated the "institution" of her husband. Worn out by childbearing, jealous of his disciples (she called them "dark people"), infuriated by his decision to give up the copyrights on all his work after 1881, she gradually became a hysterical paranoiac. The familiar story of the last 25 years of their life together is terrible, ending in the old man's wild flight from home at 82, to die of pneumonia in a stationmaster...
Biographer Simmons' sympathetic treatment of Tolstoy's religion of "nonresistance to evil," love for the common people, and individual self-perfection by undogmatic Christianity make it seem the titanic moral effort of an intellectual child, caught in the determinism of society and history upon which his own War and Peace was based. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him; the Communist Lenin wrote incisively: "On the one hand, an extraordinarily powerful, direct and sincere protest against social lies and hypocrisy; on the other, a Tolstoyan, that is, a wornout, historical sniveler called the Russian intellectual, who, publicly beating...