When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, a young Leo Tolstoy set himself three immediate aims: to gamble, to marry and to obtain a  post. At that time he managed only the first. The writer’s momentous life would be full of forced breaks and abrupt departures, from the death of his beloved parents to an abandonment of the social class into which he had been born. The book pieces together Tolstoy’s life, offering an account of the novelist’s deepest feelings and motives, and an interpretation of his major works, including the celebrated novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Leo Tolstoy is published by Reaktion Books.

FIVE MINUTES WITH andrei zorin

Andrei Zorin is professor and chair of Russian at the University of Oxford. He is the author or co-author of several books on Russian literature and culture, including On The Periphery of Europe 1762–1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite.

Why were you interested in writing a book about Tolstoy?

When someone studies Russian literature, the question is very much redundant! I was a huge Tolstoy fan since I was 12 years old. I never dared study him because the subject looked very complicated and there are libraries of great books written about him. For a long time, I thought I would do so later, and then realised if I ever would, I should start. Exactly at that moment, the publisher came forward with the great suggestion to write his biography.

What are your academic interests?

In the Soviet Union, I worked on late 18th and early 19th century culture. The twentieth century was a complete taboo because it was completely politicised like much of the 19th century. Lenin wrote about Tolstoy which made writing anything about him very difficult. The 18th century seemed a rather safe haven. I was interested in doing something before the canonical period of Russian literature from Pushkin to Chekhov. I concentrated on the emergence of romantic culture. Tolstoy is its ideal embodiment, in his attitude to himself and the world. 

How would you characterise Tolstoy?

He is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest novelists of all periods. William Faulkner when asked for the three greatest novels ever written famously cited Anna Karenina as the first, second and third. Tolstoy has an artistic legacy, but he was also immensely important philosophically. He was very radical in his anarchism, rejection of the rule of law or of any rights of the state to govern. He had hundreds of thousands of followers. His most important contribution to world culture is his personality, his quest for personal perfection. His works don’t just reflect but constitute his life. 

What sources gave you the greatest insights during your research?

It is all but impossible to find new source material written by Tolstoy himself. Nearly everything he’s written is published and has been extensively worked over. But I found a lot of interesting material in the letters between his wife Sofia and her sister Tatyana. There are so many well known facts and texts about him, but looking through family correspondence revealed a lot.

What is your key conclusion about the man?

From Lenin to Isaiah Berlin, people insisted Tolstoy had irreconcilable contradictions: between thinker and writer, the different aspects of his thought, the periods in his life. But for me he is an absolutely consistent person. He had several deep spiritual crises, he abandoned literature, his political class and family. But the more I read, the more logical and inevitable every step seemed. It’s human to be contradictory. Tolstoy struggled with self-improvement to come closer to his ideal human being. He felt he was not up to the standards he set for himself and was sure from the start he would never achieve them. The more you develop, the more sophisticated your ideas of perfection; the more you try, the further is your ideal. He knew that very well. 

What is his relevance today?

We see a huge resurgence of Tolstoy’s ideas which for a long period seemed marginal: vegetarianism, non-violence, love of nature, down-shifting to a simpler lifestyle, an absolute rejection of the state and the interference of official institutions in human life, the idea of total autonomy, his aversion to sexuality. What seemed ridiculous has become mainstream. 

How is he regarded by the Russian state? 

The Soviet system only saw one side of him: the patriotic strain in War and Peace. He could not be discarded, and his complete works were published but there was a taboo: they were not circulated. Like many other things, the fashion for Tolstoy now in Russia comes from the West. Especially during the centenary of his death, he was very much downplayed, given his conflict with the Orthodox church. Official ideology wants to use Tolstoy as a great writer but his militant stance against the Church, his anarchism and his pacifism does not fit, so he is sanitised. If you asked Putin, he would say Tolstoy is a great Russian author, writer and patriot reflecting the glory of Russia. Some people will say he was anti-Russian, but official ideology will try to repaint him. On the other side, Alexei Navalny even quoted him in his Putin’s Palace film: “The villains who robbed the people gathered together, recruited soldiers and judges to guard their orgy, and are feasting.”

What about the view of individual Russians? 

The main problem with the younger generation is how make them read such enormously long books. We studied War and Peace for two months in high school. Most read the book and had to write many essays on it, and even those who didn’t knew the characters and what it was about. Now a 20 page article is called a “long read”. My biography has sold better in Russian than I anticipated, and the reaction was good, maybe partly because it is much shorter than previous biographies. A lot of people said they never imagined it could be written in 180 pages.

What is your own favourite Tolstoy work? 

War and Peace. I have read it from beginning to the end seven times, and specific parts more often. Each time I think one day I’ll reach the stage when I’ll know everything and won’t find anything surprising, but that hasn’t happened yet. You would be very stupid not to admire Anna Karenina but I see it as a more conventional book. It’s absolutely superb in form but doesn’t have the same vital energy. 

How did you find writing in English and Russian? 

It took four years, partly because I was trying to fit such an enormous mass of material into a short book, partly because I write in English much slower than in Russian. After that I prepared a Russian version. Of course, the way you think and present your thoughts in both languages is very different. Tolstoy was a francophone who knew Russian both from the inside and the outside and understood this problem: every time he writes in War and Peace about the patriotic feelings of Russians, he uses the French word “latente” because he could not find a Russian word reflecting this latent feeling which motivates behaviour but is unable and unwilling to express itself. Tolstoy’s nearly unbearable Russian syntax does not work well in other languages, but he needed it to describe the complexity of the human soul. As Gorky said, “do you think it was easy for him to write in such a clumsy way? He knew how to write very well and had to correct it ten times to make it sound really clumsy”. 

What is your next book?

Even before this biography, I started - not working but thinking - on an academic monograph about Tolstoy. Now I’m back trying to write the bigger work. I don’t want to do the same thing twice. I’ll try to root Tolstoy in romantic mythology, in his time, as the embodiment of the age he lived through. 

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

REVIEWS

‘[Tolstoy's] urge to shed distractions and commitments is one of the continuities that Andrei Zorin, a cultural historian at Oxford, traces in his beautiful account of Tolstoy's long, astonishing life . . . In an ingenious, seamless approach that distinguishes his biography from others, Mr Zorin treats the events of Tolstoy's life and his writing as a single, indivisible whole.’ — The Economist 'Books of the Year'

‘Andrei Zorin's Leo Tolstoy illuminates Tolstoy's personal prejudices and passions as the core of his fiction. Zorin's biography has confirmed my amateurish guess that Tolstoy's main obsession was his fear of the uncontrollable forces of sex, music and violence ruling his life.’ — Zinovy Zinik, TLS 'Books of the Year'

‘The figure that emerges from these pages is a complex one. For left-wing progressives, Tolstoy was a reactionary; while conservatives saw him as a self-destructive nihilist . . . A pious religious fanatic with a messianic complex might be somewhat closer to the truth. But even Christ himself would have found it impossible to live by the perfect moral order Tolstoy was always attempting to build: both in life and in art.’ — Sunday Independent, Dublin

‘Zorin provides a skeleton of nineteenth-century Russian history, but his strengths do not lie there, His governing metaphor is not socio-political but intensely emotional, taken from Tolstoy’s earliest memory as a swaddled infant: a helpless person irrationally bound, held down by others and desperately wanting out . . . Zorin helps us to move beyond the canonical image of Tolstoy as a fabulously fun-loving, life-affirming parent. Inventive, curious and charismatic he certainly was (these are the traits of a born teacher of children, and Zorin devotes much attention to Tolstoy’s pedagogical projects and peasant schools).’ — TLS

‘I know of no other biography of Tolstoy as succinct, as objective, as readable or as thought-provoking as Andrei Zorin’s.’ — Donald Rayfield, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian, Queen Mary University of London

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