Tolstoy: A Russian Life
Bonus Content: Images fromTolstoy(Click on Images  to Enlarge)Tolstoy and his Starley  Rover Bicycle, 1895. Credit: Tolstoi: Dokumenty. Rukopisi. Fotografi, Moscow, 1995The fourth draft of  the opening of Anna Karenina, 1873 • Credit: Tolstoi: Dokumenty. Rukopisi. Fotografi, Moscow, 1995Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Rosamund BartlettQ: What drew you to Tolstoy?A:Apart from a lifetime fascination with the great Russian writers at the personal and professional  level, my interest was spurred by having previously written a biography of Chekhov and translated his stories and letters.  One cannot avoid noticing Chekhov’s reverence for Tolstoy as a writer, thinker, and social activist—it crops up in numerous  remarkable letters he wrote both before and after he became friends with the great writer. For Chekhov, Tolstoy was the most  important person in Russia, and not just as an artist and father figure, but as a moral authority. I wanted to gain a deeper  understanding of what it was that made Chekhov, and indeed the majority of the Russian population, look up to Tolstoy as a  spiritual leader at the end of the nineteenth century, when his stature was greater than that of the tsar.Q: Why write a new biography of Tolstoy now?A:There are three main reasons. First, the centenary of Tolstoy’s death in November 2010 provided a  great opportunity to assess his legacy, and second, there are surprisingly few other English-language biographies of  Tolstoy. Third, and most important, the arrival of perestroika and glasnost, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in  1991, changed fundamentally and irrevocably how we write about Russia, including its great writers. Despite his worldwide  fame as a novelist, Tolstoy was, like all other Russian writers, posthumously subject to ideological control, and the  suppression of his monumental spiritual legacy after 1917 resulted in a skewed picture of his life. The relaxation of  censorship introduced by Gorbachev, however, opened the floodgates to a mass of new material, upon which this biography  draws extensively.Q: What is different about your biography?A:Today we have much more objective information about Tolstoy himself and about his family, his many  followers, the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (which excommunicated him in 1901), and the tsarist government. We  can construct a much fuller and more accurate picture of Tolstoy’s life and, just as important, place it in a detailed  cultural context. Moreover, this biography is written from Tolstoy’s own point of view, rather than that of the typical  Anglophone reader. So instead of focusing most attention on the seventeen-year-period in whichWar and PeaceandAnna Kareninawere written, it places a great deal of emphasis on the last thirty years of Tolstoy’s life, when he  became a social and religious crusader.Q: Why did you choose the subtitle "A Russian Life"?A:I see Tolstoy as a genius who embodied much of the Russian experience in all its intense and  passionate extremes. Using the particular structure of my biography, I wanted to show that Tolstoy, in the course of his  eighty-two years, actually lived many lives, most of which were deeply Russian archetypes: the reckless gambler, the  repentant nobleman, the holy fool, the admired elder, the nihilist, and others.Q: How did translating Tolstoy’s work inform the biography?A:When I wrote my biography of Chekhov, I found it very fruitful to translate some of his greatest  short stories at the same time. In fact, most of my inspiration for writing Chekhov’s biography came from the experience of  engaging closely with the rhythms and cadences of his prose. I wanted to have the same experience with Tolstoy, and indeed I  found that whatever insights I have of Tolstoy’s personality probably came from having completed half of my translation ofAnna Kareninabefore embarking on my biography of its author. Translating Tolstoy means getting to know him from the  inside.Q:What were you most surprised to learn in your research?A:I had not expected to discover how much love and devotion Tolstoy poured into his educational work,  both as a founder of schools for illiterate peasantry in which he himself taught, and as the author of a pioneering primer  designed to help all Russian children learn to read and write. Tolstoy’s educational ideas were rather unorthodox and  anarchic, like all his thinking, but deeply original, and conceived with the Russian culture and the Russian language in  mind. It is extraordinary to consider that after finishing the Homeric epic ofWar and Peace, Tolstoy literally went  back to the letters of the alphabet.Q:You write extensively about Tolstoy as a political figure in his time, but what is important to note about his  legacy?A:I was greatly surprised to discover the extent of Tolstoy’s importance as a political figure in  Russia, beginning in the 1860s, before he wroteWar and Peace, and culminating with the international media event of  his death in 1910. But the story does not end there. In my epilogue, I discuss what happened to Tolstoy and his artistic and  religious legacy after 1917—a story that has much to do with Russia’s signal failure to mark the centenary of his death in  2010 in any serious way, and which is crucial to our understanding of the man. In addition, Tolstoy’s enormous body of  spiritual writings was only published once, in the complete collected works, with a tiny print run, so generations of  Russians grew up in the twentieth century without any knowledge of them. Today Tolstoy remains a threat to the Russian  establishment because of his anarchic ideas and his never-ending quest for truth.Q:What’s the one thing you want everyone to know about Tolstoy?A:Tolstoy may not have been as endearing a man as Chekhov, nor as compassionate and open as an artist,  but he deserves our admiration for his fearless courage in standing up to a corrupt regime and refusing to be silent about  its moral failures. He also fully deserves his reputation as one of the world’s great novelists for creating all those  unforgettable characters with such closely observed psychological detail. As in all great works of art, their experiences  transcend time and place, and articulate what it is to be human. A novel likeWar and Peaceis universal and  timeless, and offers rich rewards on a second, third, and fourth reading.