Word: tolstoys
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Henri Troyat, Russian-born novelist, biographer of Dostoevsky and Pushkin and member of the French Academy, is well aware of the dangers of attempting to "explain" Tolstoy. Instead of offering absolute answers, he approaches his immense task with unflagging respect and fascination for the conflicting variety of ideas and emotions that filled Tolstoy's 82 years. His exhaustive but never exhausting chronology provides a picture of Tolstoy the man, as complete as can be found in any one book. What gives the biography its great stature, however, is not so much its bulk as the masterly stance Troyat takes...
...character that emerges is not altogether attractive, especially for those whose image of Tolstoy is based solely on reverential readings of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The ideas and emotions that clashed in those masterpieces warred within Tolstoy himself, sending him into cycles of sublime creativity and profound depression. To Tolstoy, reality always differed from hopes and dreams, and it was axiomatic to his art that life would be most disappointing to those characters who had the highest qualities. In his own life, that same axiom became a self-fulfilling prophecy...
Improving on Descartes. Although Tolstoy was constantly hounded by feelings of doubt and inadequacy, he accepted the fact of his genius and singularity without question. He was a born taker; as a youth, he amended Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am," to "I want, therefore I am." And why not? Rich, landed and titled in a country where rural life still turned on the relationship of serf to master, Tolstoy could indulge his appetites without fear of rebuke. As a 22-year-old volunteer, he fought rebel tribesmen in the Caucasus, wenched, gambled, and tossed off cocktails made...
...that constant striving for purity that fed his artistic and spiritual life. While carousing in the Caucasus, he wrote Story of My Childhood-which was instantly accepted for publication and drew praise from Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Later, in the Crimea, Tolstoy served bravely as an artillery officer and wrote Sevastopol Sketches, which, in their fidelity to the sweep and detail of battle, rank as some of the best war correspondence of all time. The very flaws and inconsistencies that he displayed during those years would, as Troyat notes, "later enable him to embrace the attitudes of each of his characters...
...addition, he extolled the virtues of family life at the same time that he neglected his own. And it is this contradiction that Troyat documents with special warmth-particularly the love-hate relationship between Tolstoy and his wife Sonya. Troyat's portrait of Sonya is considerably more sympathetic than that drawn by most other biographers. During 48 years of marriage, which started with a brutal wedding-night struggle that left the inexperienced bride sexually unresponsive for the rest of her life, she bore his children, efficiently managed Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate, transcribed his chicken scratches into legible manuscripts...