Tolstoy: A Biography

In Tolstoy: A Biography (1988), British novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson narrates the life of the great Russian author and activist, focusing on what Wilson sees as the wellspring of Tolstoy’s creativity: prodigious self-consciousness, and a desire to reimagine himself as an endless series of different characters. Wilson’s Tolstoy won the 1988 Whitbread Prize for Biography and has been called the “best Tolstoy life in English, at least since Aylmer Maude's ground-breaking, firsthand Life of Tolstoy, and the best critical weighing since George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky: An Essay in Contrast” (Kirkus Reviews).

Wilson begins his account with the moment on March 25, 1850, when a young nobleman, twenty-two years old, drunk, dissolute, and without a vocation, sat down to write his first work of fiction. Entitled “A History of Yesterday,” it was highly derivative of A Sentimental Journey by English novelist Laurence Sterne. The young man didn’t bother to finish it. The moment—and the work—would be of no consequence if it hadn’t been the beginning of Lev Tolstoy’s career as an author.

Tolstoy was already an obsessive diary-keeper. Wilson traces the development of Tolstoy’s fiction writing from his diaries. Where in his diaries Tolstoy recorded his frustrations and remorse, in his fiction he imagined how he might have done differently in the past and how he might be different in the future.



Orphaned at an early age, Tolstoy was raised by an inconstant succession of aunts, most of them eccentric. Wilson emphasizes that he spent his early life playing roles, searching for an identity that might fit him. In Kazan, he was an industrious law student, in St Petersburg, a man of fashion. In Moscow, he gambled, visited brothels, and drank heavily. On his family estates, he played the country gentleman farmer. All the while, his diaries record a seething self-criticism, a desperate desire to take control of his life and become a better person.

Wilson introduces the idea that Tolstoy had a particular gift: a prodigious emotional sensitivity, or “sensibility.” Wilson compares it with perfect pitch, an inability to endure falseness. To this sensibility, Wilson traces the chaos of the novelist’s early life: his sexual voraciousness, violence, lack of discipline, and his guilt and remorse about these things. In short: the “history of this sensibility is a mess.” His sensibility caused Tolstoy to feel alone, exceptional: “Once for all I must accustom myself to the idea that I am an exceptional being, one who is ahead of his period, and who is by temperament absurd, unsociable and always dissatisfied,” he wrote. ''I have never met a single man who was morally as good as I am, who has always in every situation been drawn, as I have been, to the good. Who, like me, is always ready to sacrifice everything for this ideal. It is on this account that I find no society in which I feel at home.”

Wilson argues that Tolstoy’s first finished work, “Childhood,” was an attempt by the author to invent the childhood memories he wished he had—in place of the blankness of trauma revealed in his diaries. Wilson draws on his own experience as a novelist to trace the way Tolstoy develops his experiences (and longing for other experiences) into art.



Tolstoy proposed to Sofia Behrs when he was thirty-four and she was eighteen. “He found her strange and fascinating. She found him monstrous and frightening. There was a strong sexual attraction between them.” He demanded that the wedding take place within a week because his desire for his bride was so strong. Before the wedding, however, he insisted that he and Sofia should read one another’s diaries so that there would be no secrets between them. Tolstoy’s diary contained explicit details of his sexual history: brothel visits, assaults on peasant women, and homosexual curiosity. Sofia never recovered. Wilson calls their marriage “one of the most closely documented and one of the most miserable marriages in history.” Sofia bore seven children in seven years—and then another six during the rest of their marriage (only eight children survived). Tolstoy was selfish in asserting his right to his wife’s body: on one occasion, shortly after childbirth, she suffered a nearly fatal hemorrhage as a result. However, Wilson does not lay the blame for the couple’s unhappiness solely on Leo: “Both Tolstoys were vile-tempered, narcissistic, moody, and extravagantly domineering.” The Tolstoys continued to read each other’s diaries throughout their marriage.

Wilson argues that Tolstoy’s novels developed out of the novelist’s irresolvable conflicts: with God, women, and Russia. He points out that Tolstoy’s fiction is less literally autobiographical than many previous biographers have assumed, but he also traces the many links between Tolstoy’s life and work. Characters as diverse as Pierre Bezukhov, Nikolai Rostov, and Anna Karenina are all, according to Wilson, opportunities for Tolstoy to explore his own inner conflicts.

By the time he had completed his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Wilson suggests Tolstoy had “gobbled up” his whole life: “part of himself ceased to exist.”



Thus, Wilson explains Tolstoy’s dramatic renunciation of fiction in favor of religion and activism. Wilson has little sympathy for this phase of Tolstoy’s life: “With no fiction to write,” he says, the author began “making a fictitious character out of himself.” Wilson saves his harshest words for Tolstoy’s religious conversion: “Tolstoy's religion is ultimately the most searching criticism of Christianity which there is. He shows that it does not work.”

As well as Christian faith, Tolstoy evangelized for non-violence, vegetarianism, and sexual abstinence. Wilson portrays him “wasting his time in tomfool attempts to be like the peasants.” On one occasion, Tolstoy fires his swineherd (for being drunk), takes charge of the pigs, and cures their hams so badly that they rot.

Increasingly obsessed with the idea of renunciation, Tolstoy left his home and wife for good at the age of eighty-two, leaving at dawn with a few rubles. At a provincial railway station only 150 km from his house, Tolstoy died. His last words were addressed to his son, Sergey: “I love Truth . . . very much . . . I love Truth.”