To the 190th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy: "At the age of sixteen I wore a medallion with a portrait of Rousseau instead of a cross on my neck"

"To live honestly, we must break up, get confused, fight, make mistakes, start and throw, and always struggle and lose. And tranquility is spiritual meanness", - Tolstoy wrote to his beloved aunt, Countess A. A. Tolstoy (1828-1910), whose 190th birthday is celebrated on September 9, 2018.

This life attitude makes it possible to more clearly consider the contradictions and rare integrity of nature, the ups and downs of a mighty person who has subordinated several generations of readers to his spiritual influence in Russia and the world. The Presidential Library portal features a new extensive electronic collection "Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)", consisting of sections "Life and work of Leo Tolstoy", "Creativity of Leo Tolstoy", "On the work of Leo Tolstoy", "Images of Leo Tolstoy and people of his circle", "Memory of the writer". Among the digitized books - the main works of Tolstoy "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", as well as rare books about him: "The Soul of Leo Tolstoy" (1913) N. Timkovsky, "L. N. Tolstoy as a philosopher" (1914) by P. Sorokin, "Conversations with Leo Tolstoy" (1911) S. Spiro, "How to teach to write Count  L. N. Tolstoy?" (1903) by F. Tishchenko and others.

When learning materials about Leo Tolstoy, you are convinced that he "desired, tangled, fought" in search of the meaning of life and being a novice author and a wise man. According to filmmaker Sergei Gerasimov, who shot the film about Tolstoy and played the main role in it, over the years Tolstoy's writings are interested not so much in the changes in his characters as in the changes in the author himself. The rarities, digitized by the Presidential Library, make it possible to trace the dynamics of these changes in the process of the formation of the personality of the great writer and great citizen, reflected, for example, in the book “The Soul of Leo Tolstoy”.

The fourth son in the family of the Yasnaya Polyana branch of the Tolstoy family (the mother was a nee Princess Volkonskaya) and early orphaned, Lyovushka grew up under the supervision of Russian nannies, German teachers and French tutors. Of the "seven nurses" few knew what a deep inner work was going on in this ordinary-looking child: he read a lot, thought a lot, tried to write. "I have read", - Leo Tolstoy later told me, - all Russo, all twenty volumes ... I more than admired him, I idolized him. At the age of sixteen I wore a medallion with a portrait of Rousseau instead of a cross on my neck" (R. Ivanov-Razumnik, "Leo Tolstoy".1910).

Tolstoy was fond of music. Sometimes he spent hours learning and playing the works of Bach, Mozart, Chopin and then ceased to exist for his family. He also absorbed his own diary - it was this habit that for a long time pushed Leo Tolstoy to create most of the works.

In September 1852, the magazine Sovremennik was released in St. Petersburg, in which the "Childhood" was published, signed by the editors with the initials "L. T". The story of the development of the child's soul, conveyed with deep truthfulness and a touch of sentimentality, immediately revealed in the author a huge artist.

"Adolescence" 23-year-old Junker, Tolstoy, who left the university and joined the military service, was already adding to the Caucasus during the Crimean War. Turgenev, rejoicing at the publication of the book in one of his letters, prophetically added: "Let God Tolstoy live, I hope, still surprise us all - this is the first-rate talent". Then there was "Youth", as hot as the two previous books, which was met by readers. "Having finished his youth trilogy, Tolstoy stood on a par with Turgenev, Goncharov, Ostrovsky", - sums up S. Spiro in his memoirs "Conversations with Leo Tolstoy".  

However, this trilogy did not create the literary glory of Tolstoy among the general public - it came after the book of essays "Sevastopol Stories" appeared. Defending Russia in Crimea, Tolstoy saw the human slaughter close - and was stunned by its senselessness, cruelty, methods of its conduct. It was a scorching truth about the war. "Before Tolstoy battles and combats in Russian literature were romanticized, - wrote R. Ivanov-Razumnik in the work "Leo Tolstoy". - Even the great realist Pushkin in his "Journey to Arzrum" made romantic gauze on the description of the war. However, he did not see a real war. It was necessary for the great artist to get into the besieged Sevastopol in order to understand what war is, and to describe it with terrific, ruthless realism".

Later, already in War and Peace, Tolstoy will be able to develop a theme, to show that war is "an inconspicuous, silent fulfillment of "duty" - the duty to accept death - by thousands of gray, inconspicuous people; at the same time, the war is intrigues, aristocracy of staff kid gloves, intendant theft, a game of ambition and vanity; but above all else and after all, war is a meaningless, accidental death, merciless suffering, mutilation, wounds, brutality, destruction".

Tolstoy began to write a novel in late 1863. The author faced a tremendous task. The scene of action is all of Europe, from the Volga to Austerlitz. Among the actors on the Russian side, the writer brought his own circle. In the memoirs of Tolstoy's childhood, I. Nazhivin writes in the book "From the Life of Leo Tolstoy" (1911), a digital copy of which is available in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library, one can find almost all the main characters of War and Peace: Tolstoy’s Grandfather, Count Ilya Andreevich Tolstoy, reproduced in the novel under the name of Ilya Andreevich Rostov; Countess of Rostov - grandmother of the writer Pelageya Nikolaevna; their son Nicholas, Tolstoy's father, Nikolai Rostov, one of the main characters of War and Peace; Princess Mary - the mother of Leo Nikolayevich Maria Volkonskaya. And even the "black-haired Milka" was really a favorite dog of the writer's father…   

Speaking of the novel "War and Peace", one cannot help but recalling the visionary words of Tolstoy's wife Sophia Andreevna (born Bers), which were appreciated by the author of the epic. "And I still have not said why you are clever", we read in "Letters from Count L. Tolstoy to his wife: 1862-1910". "You, like a good wife, thought of your husband as yourself, but I remember how you told me that my military and historical history, about which I try so hard, will not work well, but it will be different - family, characters, psychological. This is so true, as much as possible".

However, the Yasnaya Polyana estate of Leo Nikolayevich was not a place of idyll. Sofya Andreevna stoically kept the house on herself, raised children, accepted the endless stream of guests of her husband, who was more than devoted (copying the pages of War and Peace), and could not be happy with him. "She was an ambassador to reality in this house", - V. Shklovsky wrote in the sensational study "Leo Tolstoy", recalled that children should live "like everyone", they need money, daughters need to be married, it is necessary that sons graduated from high school and university. We must be a famous writer, we must write another book, like "Anna Karenina" ... one must be in the "light", and not among the "dark", strange people. She was representative of the common sense of the day, the focus of the prejudices of time, she was like Tolstoy created her older than her for sixteen years. She loved him woefully, enviously and vainly. <...> She wanted a big one. I wanted to write books myself. Take interesting guests, play the piano. But Leo Nikolayevich played better on the piano than hers".

And in the last general battle, Sofya Andreevna lost. Leo Nikolayevich’s leaving from Yasnaya Polyana became her drama, she wanted at all costs to find and return the "titan child", because "there is no one to give a drop for the rest of his life", - as Vlas Doroshevich after Tolstoy’s leaving wrote on October book of the "Russkoye Slovo" (1910), adding: "The eagle flew so high from us that where should we watch its flight?!"

"Do not look for him! - demanded "Odessa News", referring to the family. "He's not yours, he's for everyone!"

He, so many times left "in the internal emigration" and returned back, this time solved the issue cardinally. "And the greatest act of this inner work was Leo Tolstoy's last act of life - October 28, 1910 leaving from Yasnaya Polyana and his death on November 7 (old style) in 1910 at the Astapovo station", - writes R. Ivanov-Razumnik in his work "Leo Tolstoy". - He also wanted to leave the environment that surrounds him, which for a long time, since the eighties, he hated it. He begged to release him: "I cannot live like this. Have pity on me. I'm worn out. Let me go". And he heard in reply: "If you leave, then ... I will go under that train, on which you will go ..."". And he believed, deciding: here is his cross ... This cross he carried for a quarter of a century. "And when he realized that a man must find himself at all costs, regardless of any neighbors, when he decided to throw off his heavy cross from his shoulders to accept a new art - the life of a homeless and lonely old man - then Death laid its last cross ... "