Leo Tolstoy: Author and Anarchist
The life of the writer, farmer, husband, educator, and pacifist, now on screen from the Lantern. Plus, an interactive quiz.
Now appearing in Lantern Theater Company’s digital premiere production of The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens & Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord — a new take on the company’s 2017 smash hit play and streaming on demand January 11 through February 27, 2022 — Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (better known to Americans as Leo Tolstoy) was born on his noble family’s estate in 1828. By the age of 12, both his parents and his legal guardian had died, leaving him in the care of an aunt and his elder siblings, including his beloved brother Nikolai.
As a young man, Tolstoy displayed little of the promise that would one day lead him to create War and Peace, what some call the greatest novel ever written. He was an indifferent student at university, first studying Asian language, then the easier law, then dropping out entirely. He returned to the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and attempted to make a go at working with and managing the serfs who farmed the grounds. He often made a mess of the work, though; one summer, he cured all of the hams incorrectly, spoiling them for the year. At the same time, he began keeping brutally honest journals about his day-to-day activities, cataloguing the details of his daily gymnastics workouts alongside his most minute moral failures.
A stint in the army was a major turning point. On the advice of his brother Nikolai, the young Tolstoy joined up shortly before the Crimean War. He wrote his first book, the autobiographical Childhood, during the long stretches of inactivity, when he tired of hunting and chasing local women. In 1854, however, he requested a transfer to Sevastopol, one of the fiercest areas for combat in the war. In between battles, he wrote a second book and a series of stories about the war. His career as a writer was born.
Though celebrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg literary circles, Tolstoy returned again to Yasnaya Polyana, where he opened a school for peasant children and continued to learn about farming. His interests and activities were diverse: he was a gambler, an estate manager, a land-dispute mediator, a writer, a teacher, and, at the age of 34, a husband.
Sophia Behrs married Tolstoy in 1862, when she was 18 and he was 34. The night before their wedding, Tolstoy asked Sophia to read his self-lacerating diaries so that she could be sure she was able to forgive his transgressions and still marry him. She did. They were married for 48 years, until Tolstoy’s death while on pilgrimage in 1910 — which he left for without telling Sophia.
Sophia was more than a wife and mother to their 13 children; she also managed the estate and Tolstoy’s business affairs, advising her husband on copyright matters and supporting his career. When he wrote and reworked the sprawling, 1,200-page epic War and Peace, she worked by hand and candlelight to copy it out in its entirety no fewer than seven times before he felt it was ready for publication.
War and Peace contains 580 characters: some are historical, some are fictional, and some are both, as nearly every person Tolstoy knew in life made their way onto the pages in fictionalized form. Its publication in 1869 was a smashing success. Eight years later came Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s second masterpiece and the last of his realist novels. Shortly after its 1878 publication, Tolstoy underwent an emotional crisis and a spiritual revival, leading him to develop a philosophy of complete nonviolence and to become the religious anarchist we meet in The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens & Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord.
I know that my union with other people cannot be severed by a line of frontier and by Government decrees. — Tolstoy, What I Believe (1884)
Tolstoy’s enormous fame meant that his creed of universal love and influence as a spiritual leader extended worldwide, even after being excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 for his radical rejection of the church’s dogma. He inspired Quakers in America, thousands of self-styled vegetarian “Tolstoyans” all over the globe (dozens of whom moved onto the Tolstoy estate), and one especially important pacifist: Mahatma Gandhi, who corresponded with the author and even organized Tolstoy Farm, a cooperative colony near Johannesburg, South Africa.
Tolstoy’s influence extends to the Philadelphia area as well. In 1894, a young Philadelphia rabbi named Joseph Krauskopf visited Tolstoy in Russia, where the writer suggested the rabbi start farm schools in the United States to help struggling Jewish families. He did, and the school Rabbi Krauskopf founded in Doylestown in 1896 continues to educate students today as Delaware Valley University.
The Quiz
The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens & Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in July 2021 with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming on demand January 11 through February 27, 2022. Visit our website for tickets and information.
