I‘ve been a bit sick the past few days, but I was tweeting earlier in the week about Leo Tolstoy’s birthday.

Born 9 September 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich (“Leo”) Tolstoy wrote monumental works such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, at once hailed as masterpieces of world literature. Despite his canonical place, however, Tolstoy was always at odds with the society around him.

He was born into a noble family at the family’s manor house at Yasnaya Polyana, which–with some intermittent exceptions–is where Tolstoy spent his whole life.

There is a great quote buried somewhere in the Childhood trilogy (Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth; 1852 – 1856), about how there is a legitimate physiognomy (I can’t seem to locate the quote) not in how our looks shape us, but how our *perceptions of how other people look at us* do. While it has been pointed out that the trilogy is not completely autobiographical, it’s difficult not to draw the conclusion that young Tolstoy thought himself ugly. But the flipside to this, and the beauty of the trilogy is how the protagonist uses his bitterness and dissatisfaction to question surface relations between people, and to develop a remarkable amount of empathy for all the characters represented as living in the house.

Tolstoy translator Judson Rosengrant describes how the Russian poet, critic, and publisher Nikolay Nekrasov was immediately intrigued upon reading the absorbing prose of Childhood, which Tolstoy had sent to him anonymously by way of a relative. It was on his second reading that Nekrasov realized that the author of the book was a major talent who was writing in an absorbing, totally unique style, and with a degree of sophistication that had few precedents in Russian, or indeed in world literature at that point.

Tolstoy wrote with astonishing penetration, as well as a unique depth of understanding about how the world around us shapes our feelings and perceptions. As Rosengrant explains:

“Everything that touches on the characters, or that occurs in and around them, or that is capable of being observed by them, is fully identified, is brought out of the perceptual penumbra into the bright lights of consciousness and shown to have a place, a function, a meaning.”

But Tolstoy’s early life was tumultuous. He was in and out of the army, he was a drunkard, and as one may incautiously infer from the Childhood trilogy, he wasn’t the most popular person in social circles. Instead, he threw himself into research and writing. Tolstoy’s military service in the Caucacus and in the Crimean War served as a basis for his novella “The Cossacks” and the Sevastopol Stories. As well as having personal experience of battle, Tolstoy also deeply immersed himself in memoirs and letters of Napoleonic-era generals.

After several furious years of writing, he produced towards the end of the 1860s the famous War and Peace, a sprawling novel taking in the life of multiple branches of the Russian nobility in the final years of the Napoleonic War. Here, Tolstoy’s realism reached its apogee, and readers across Europe were wowed not just by the minuteness with which Tolstoy put together grand scenes of warfare and ballroom dances, but also the convincing representation of the motivations and personalities of each of the novel’s many characters.

Gustave Flaubert, for example, wrote to Ivan Turgenev:

“Thank you for making me read Tolstoy’s novel. It’s first-rate. What a painter and what a psychologist! The first two [volumes] are sublime; but the third goes terribly to pieces. He repeats himself and he philosophizes! [Ed. note: this has always been a common complaint about the novel.] In fact the man, the author, the Russian are visible, whereas up until then one had seen only Nature and Humanity. It seems to me that in places he has some elements of Shakespeare. I uttered cries of admiration during my reading of it . . . and it’s long! Tell me about the author. Is it his first book? In any case he has his head well screwed on! Yes! It’s very good! Very good!”

[Take Flaubert’s word for it: you should read this book; it’s not about the length, it’s about the tremendous action and the memorable characters.]

But curiously, Tolstoy himself did not consider War and Peace a “proper” novel, and so he set out to write a more novel-like novel, and the result was a book that many critics consider to be the greatest novel of all time.

I admitted on Twitter that I’ve never read Anna Karenina, and my Twitter follower @zerubezhnik replied:

“I am currently arranging your kidnapping. You will be provided with a copy of Anna Karenina, a samovar, and all the kasha you can eat. You may report back upon completion of the novel.” I have assented to this and this is the last you’ll hear from me for a while. (Just kidding!)

I have read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Tolstoy’s late novellas, so I’ll say something about them.

Kreutzer Sonata—a book that rips open many closed taboo subjects (in a 19th century context) regarding sexuality, marital relations, and women’s empowerment, only to come down on the regressive “women are disloyal harlots who will stab you in the back” side on nearly all of them.

Master and Man: a good ole Russian sledding-through-a-blizzard story (feel like this is a genre; didn’t Pushkin write one?) that’s bleak in the way Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” is bleak.

Harold Bloom on Hadji Murad: “My personal touchtone for the sublime of prose, to me the best story in the world.” As a specimen of the heroic badass genre, it’s pretty good; but doesn’t the fact that it fits so squarely in those parameters take something away from its “bestness”?

Death of Ivan Ilyich is a masterpiece, though it brings up thoughts of mortality that I would have to reread it to provide a more in-depth reaction to. Definitely one of the greatest stories about aging and mortality in literature (and surprisingly funny as well! Something people working in the healthcare profession should read, both for its critique of the medical profession of Tolstoy’s time, and for the positive examples of care and compassion shown by Ilyich’s caretaker Gerasim.)

Mr. @zerubezhnik adds: “Hope you can plug ‘A Confession’ (Исповедь) a short but soul-stirring autobiographical account of the existential crisis that led LT to seek out faith, which he defined as a ‘knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives.'”

I have not read this book, but yes, it is true that Tolstoy’s life had a famous second-phase where he sought to live simply and help the poor and protest the government through a philosophy of nonviolence. Tolstoy late in life became as iconic for his philosophy of Tolstoyanism (which inspired Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.) as for his novels; the man had multiple lives.

My personal favorite Tolstoy novella is “The Forged Banknote/Coupon”—like if Cormac McCarthy wrote a version of No Country for Old Men set in Russia but with an even wilder, pinwheel-shaped black comedy-of-errors plot, and a meditative, spiritually-transformative second act. Exhilarating!

Tolstoy’s final days were rather exciting in themselves; he abandoned his home and hopped on a train to get away from his home and continue his work elsewhere, and fell sick and died at a country train station; these events are the subject of the book The Last Station which was adapted into a movie starring Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as his wife Sofiya.