Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy entered literature calmly, without any special worries that usually accompany the first steps of novice writers: he sent the manuscript of “Childhood” to the most prestigious magazine of that time, “Sovremennik”, and money for return shipping if the editors did not consider it possible to publish the work. He wrote: “...I look forward to your verdict. He will either encourage me to continue my favorite activities, or force me to burn everything I started." He was then 24 years old and an officer in the Russian army.
The answer was most positive. Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Turgenev were praised. The manuscript immediately went to print, and was followed by “Adolescence” and “Youth”. He was destined to become Gogol's successor, that is, the head of Russian literature. So from the very first publications he became a living classic.
From our school days we remember the now textbook lines from Tolstoy’s first book: “Happy, happy, irrevocable time of childhood! How not to love, not to cherish memories of her?
Fragrant time of life! A person who has just entered this world peers with admiring curiosity at everything that surrounds him. Once Montaigne's father was influenced by the fashionable in the 16th century. ideas of the Renaissance that a person is born for happiness, he woke up his son in the morning with quiet melodic music. Tolstoy's parents did not do this, but their lives little son was surrounded by happiness.
Tolstoy describes in detail how life blossoms in a small creature, how his heart responds to all the events of his daily existence, how his mind develops through an inquisitive analysis of all sounds. outside world. This is the enduring beauty of the book.
However, can the writer’s trilogy be called memoirs, a true record of the actual events of his childhood and youth? Rather, this is still a novel about the childhood of Nikolenka Irtenyev from a rich and noble family, surrounded by an atmosphere of prosperity, love, a gentle, kind boy, with a sympathetic heart and a reflective mind. All the events described by Tolstoy, of course, happened to him, and the boy’s reflections and feelings are Tolstoy’s feelings and thoughts. We will later find Kolenka Irtenyev on the pages of the novel “War and Peace” under the name Petya Rostov.
Tolstoy was rich. His estate Yasnaya Polyana, in which he spent most his life, provided him with a quiet place for creative work, not burdened with worries about their daily bread. He belonged to the upper stratum of the nobility, to to the most ancient families Count Tolstoy on his father’s side and Prince Bolkonsky on his mother’s side.
The works of the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau fell into the hands of fifteen-year-old Tolstoy. His ideas captured the boy. He ordered himself a medallion with his portrait and enthusiastically wore it on his chest. I read literally all of this man’s works and was his faithful follower until the end of his life. Respect for nature, the desire to conform one's life, one's actions with the laws of nature, a skeptical attitude towards the gifts of civilization, adopted from Rousseau, left their mark on Tolstoy's personality and all his works, on his thoughts and on his very life.
Reading the Gospels and the image of Jesus Christ, who called people to renounce violence, attracted the writer to the ideas and feelings of philanthropy. These ideas of the writer were later picked up by Mahatma Gandhi. The theory of non-resistance to evil through violence has acquired concrete outlines.
Mature Tolstoy as a person appears to be a physically healthy and strong person, with strong muscles and well-developed muscles. He walks confidently on the ground, perhaps even with the gait of his owner. He was arrogant, bold and absolutely independent in his judgments, regardless of the prevailing opinions in society, which extremely amazed the people who knew him. Everyone admired Shakespeare then. Authority English author was indisputable, but Tolstoy completely rejected him, not agreeing to recognize him as a genius. The Sovremennik employees, when he visited the editorial office, whispered: “Look at this man - he doesn’t recognize Shakespeare!”
Everyone pronounced Beethoven's name with reverence. Tolstoy decided to reject him too. Despite several phrases of praise addressed to the poet, he treated Pushkin rather coolly and almost appreciated Fet more. In this he resembled Michelangelo, who repelled all the giants of his time and surrounded himself with talents average size. Tolstoy's personality is ambiguous - otherwise he seemed to be a man with a cold analytical mind. He looked at his interlocutor and with his prickly eyes penetrated into his most hidden depths, as if turning the person inside out. Smart people they felt it and were embarrassed. Tchaikovsky was terribly worried on the eve of his meeting with Tolstoy, he was afraid of his penetrating gaze. (The fears were in vain. Tolstoy cried while listening to his music.)
Once a French author of the 17th century. La Rochefoucauld, the merciless accuser human weaknesses, wrote: “...often our most noble deeds come from our vanity.” Tolstoy loved this author, appreciated his aphorisms (he translated 98 of them). They “most of all contributed to the formation of taste in the French people and the development in them of clarity of mind and accuracy of their expressions,” he wrote about him. But this was not the only thing that attracted him to the French author.
The cold, skeptical mind of La Rochefoucauld, it must be said frankly, was akin to Tolstoy. Even the most dear to the heart The writer's characters in his novel did not escape his psychological scalpel. Nikolai Rostov, dear, honest, a kind person, finding himself on the battlefield, longs for achievement, eager to prove himself, and for what? For the sake of glory, ambition, in other words, driven by vanity. He admits to himself that for the sake of this he can abandon his mother, father, and all his dear and close people.
Tolstoy did not tolerate any falsehood, hypocrisy, or sentimentality. He observed signs of excessive sensitivity in Turgenev and treated him with restraint, and sometimes mockingly. Even when Turgenev from far away addressed him with a famous letter (“ Great writer Russian land!.."), he could not resist mocking this pathetic appeal.
All this made him a strict writer, merciless to the truth. If we talk about realism, he was a pure realist. The truth and only the truth! - this is his creative principle. I couldn’t stand any embellishment of the writer’s speech. To literary purists his style seemed clumsy, overloaded with words “what”, “how”, etc.
And with all this, Tolstoy’s personality was truly large-scale. Something powerful was coming from him. Reading it, you see neither the book, nor epithets, nor comparisons, nor figurative expressions, you don’t see the printed word. All that is called literature goes somewhere, and life itself is before us.
Writing style? We simply don’t notice it, just as we don’t notice the transparent glass through which we look out of the window at the world lying behind it. Tolstoy is as truthful as life itself. All the heroes of his works, whether genuine historical characters or invented by his imagination, are so real, alive, multidimensional that it seems they are next to us, we hear their voices, their breathing, we see their unique personality. We involuntarily say to ourselves: “What a sorcery!” And this applies not only to people, but also to nature, to a lilac bush, an oak tree, a spring forest, a horse cart.
All the features of Tolstoy’s writing skills were already evident in his first book, “Childhood.” But where did that pampered, sensitive boy and young man whom we knew under the name Kolenka Irtenyev go? He disappeared into the harsh prose of life - they remained from him for life creative personality already mature Nikolai Irtenyev (Leo Tolstoy): love of beauty, more moral than physical, hatred of ugliness, cruelty, injustice.
The late Leo Tolstoy was more of a preacher than a writer. Captivated by strange, unrealizable ideas of non-resistance to evil through violence, he creates a kind of code of conduct, gathering around himself almost a sect, to the surprise of all the sober-minded people who knew him. The paradox is that these ideas came from the Gospel, but the clergy excommunicated the writer from the church.
Leo Tolstoy is a world-class classic. It is studied at universities in France. Germany, the USA, but, to tell the truth, they are attracted by those works of the Russian writer in which he reveals the deep, shadow sides of the human soul (“Kreutzer Sonata.” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) and does this, it must be said, with an amazing, inimitable skill.
The mass Russian reader with his healthy psyche gives preference to the life-affirming works of Tolstoy, life-affirming despite all the tragedy of the events and human destinies shown in them: his epic “War and Peace”, the novel “Anna Karenina”, the stories “Hadji Murat”, “Cossacks” and etc.
Tolstoy lived a long time, wrote a lot, and by the end of his life he had written so much that it barely made it into 90 volumes of his works.
Every writer and creator is, first of all, a person. Of course, he has his own passions, his own views on life, and principles. Therefore, the heroes he created for him, like living people, are also divided, as for us, readers, into loved ones - that is, into those who share his thoughts, and into strangers. And the point is not only that there are main characters, a lot of space is given to them, a lot of attention is paid to them on the pages of the work, and secondary ones. So it is in L.N. Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”. I believe that both Captain Tushin and Timokhin, although they participate only in certain episodes, are also “from Tolstoy’s camp.” The author treats them with respect and sympathy, because, in his opinion, they constitute the best part Russian people.
L.N. Tolstoy embodies his understanding of the essence of man in the destinies of the heroes of the work. Let us remember the noble, intelligent and beautiful in actions and aspirations of Andrei Bolkonsky. After many ups and downs and catastrophic disappointments, he craves not fame, but a socially useful cause: “It is necessary that everyone knows me, so that my life goes on not only for me, so that they do not live independently of my life, so that it is reflected on everyone and so that they all lived with me." We see his arrogance in the capital's salons and the beauty and concrete help in the smoke and gunpowder of Shengraben, when Captain Tushin's battery is evacuated, we feel his personal high impulse, “his Toulon” during Battle of Austerlitz and pride because he “serves here in the regiment” and does not sit at headquarters. On the Borodino field, he is united with the soldiers and officers by a sad, tragic feeling of loss and at the same time anger at the enemy who invaded his homeland. With what bitterness he speaks about the death of his father, the ruin of his estate - he speaks in Russian, in the same words as a simple Russian soldier: “I am from Smolensk.” Always giving great importance military strategy and tactics, before the Battle of Borodino, he puts in first place the feeling of the offended pride of a patriot, discarding general phrases and talking about the specific meaning of the word “Motherland” for each person: “... I have a father, sister and son left in Bald Mountains.” It is this understanding of his unity with the people in difficult times that fills the life of Prince Andrei with new content.
Let us remember Pierre Bezukhov with his thoughts: “What is bad? What well? What should you love, what should you hate? Why live and what am I? What is life, what is death? What power rules everything? So awkward, in many ways naive, he becomes strong when he needs to protect a friend, when he realizes himself as a “Russian Bezukhov” - the winner of Napoleon, when he takes on a decision important issues- how to improve life throughout the country. Natasha Rostova, with her lively, emotional face, which shines with a happy smile from love for people and the world. This face is distorted with rage and anger when she sees how many residents of the capital, taking things away, abandon their relatives in Moscow. Thanks to her persistence, almost all of the Rostovs' carts were given to wounded soldiers and officers. The mercy of a Russian woman is embodied in this act, in her desperate cry-outburst: “Are we what kind of Germans?” On the last pages of the novel, Tolstoy depicts Natasha happy wife and mother. From the author's point of view, happy family life- This is the ideal of existence of a man and a woman. But we see the happiness of Natasha and Pierre not only in the prosperity and comfort of home, in the warmth family hearth, and above all - in understanding each other, in the fact that Natasha lived “every minute of her husband’s life.”
Tolstoy's heroes live, develop, respond to events, strive for self-improvement and goodness for people. They live the life of their Fatherland in important moments for it. They are truly the favorite heroes of Tolstoy, who believes: “To live honestly, you have to rush, get confused, fight, make mistakes, start and quit, and start again, and quit again, and forever fight and rush about. And calmness is spiritual meanness.”
Compare with them the beautiful, dissolute Helen with her mask on her face - an expression that she copies from the faces of respected persons, the boring Julie Karagina, who, like fashion in a certain period, changes mood and language and sets up networks of “Penza forests and Nizhny Novgorod estates” with beautiful ones grooms. And what is Berg worth, building his life in someone else’s image and likeness, right down to the napkin on the table and the bowl of cookies, and buying “a wardrobe and a toilet” during the general retreat from Moscow! And Boris Drubetskoy, climbing up the steps of profitable acquaintances and patronages, not even disdaining to marry Julie, who is attractive to him (“I can always get a job so that I can see her less often”). He perceives even the announcement of a French attack not as stunning news, offensive and bitter for a real citizen, but as an opportunity to show others that he was the first to know about something.
Their way of life is a waste of time, and therefore there is no point in mentioning them in the epilogue, because what could seriously change in the life of these static mannequins high society! Only Anatoly Kuragin, who didn’t even remember where he served, and apparently lives only for today, will change his fate, purifying him by participating in the Battle of Borodino and being seriously wounded. What was the reason for their static, patterned life, which does not arouse the reader’s interest? Let's turn to another hero, much more sympathetic and emotional, and go through the stages of his life. Nikolai Rostov is talented and lively, in his own way very decent, because he cannot break his word to Sonya, he considers it his duty to pay his father’s debts. At the call of romance, he leaves the university and goes to war as an ordinary cadet, disdainfully discarding letters of recommendation. He bullies the “staff” Bolkonsky, although he realizes that he would really like to have him as his friend.
But he will get scared near Shengraben, run like a hare, and ask to sit on the gun carriage with a slight wound. He does not understand the feat of Raevsky, who went ahead of the army with his teenage sons to raise the morale of the army. Having gone to defend an innocently injured comrade, he will not complete the job, because he will fall into an atmosphere of fanatical deification of the sovereign-emperor and will lose time in the crowd at the ceremonial meeting. By the way, Leo Tolstoy did not find a place for Nikolai Rostov on the Borodino field - it was at this time that he was in the rear taking care of the horses and the buffet table. In difficult times, he will help Princess Marya, then, having fallen in love with her, he will become her husband, will work hard on the estate, raising it after devastation, but he will not be able to fully understand his wife and will not love his children like Pierre. And such family happiness, like Natasha and Pierre, the author will not give him.
Since 1812, many nobles and officers began to treat their serfs in a new way, because together with them, ordinary soldiers, partisans and militias, they defeated the enemy. And Nikolai, irritated by household chores, beats his serf so hard that he breaks the stone on his ring. It may well be that he beats the one who went with him to defend Russia. Many of the former officers were thinking about changing political system, because “in the courts there is theft, in the army there is only one stick: shagistika, settlements - they torture the people, they strangle education. What’s young, honestly, is ruined!” Next to them are future heroes Senate Square- Pierre, Nikolinka Bolkonsky. Vasily Denisov sympathizes with them and will probably join.
Nikolai Rostov does not doubt their integrity, he could also go with them, but he becomes the opposite side. According to Nikolai Rostov, nothing can be changed if state guidelines exist; there is no need to even think about it. He’s had this since his youth: to chop and not think, that’s all! Therefore, he can, mindlessly following Arakcheev’s order, “go with the squadron and cut down” against his family and friends...
According to Leo Tolstoy, it is the hard work of thought and heart that is the main sign of personality, the essence of a person. So, thought, the search for the meaning of life, one’s place in life, big job over improving one’s own personality - this is what makes up the core of a real person, this is what Leo Tolstoy values and respects in people. This is what the author and his favorite heroes bequeath to us - the mysterious path to real human happiness.
Composition
How do you imagine Leo Tolstoy? What seems most important to you in his attitude towards himself and towards the people around him?
Leo Tolstoy lived a long and complex life, in which there were many turning points that changed the writer’s worldview and his aesthetic positions. The main thing in Tolstoy’s character was a constant search for truth and meaning. human existence. This is also in early stories“Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”, and in the most later works philosophical, in nature, in which he affirms the idea of self-improvement and non-resistance to evil through violence. The struggle between good and evil constantly worried Tolstoy as a person and a writer.
Exists huge collection portraits of Leo Tolstoy: he was painted, sculpted, sculpted, photographed. Which of the portraits you know, in your opinion, most accurately reproduces not only his appearance, but also the spiritual qualities of this unusual person?
The portrait of L. N. Tolstoy by I. N. Kramskoy from 1873 is memorable. The writer is 45 years old. He is already the renowned author of Sevastopol Stories, an autobiographical trilogy, and the novel War and Peace, and a permanent resident of Yasnaya Polyana. The artist perfectly conveys the intensity of Tolstoy’s thoughts, sharp gaze, and internal energy. Lev Nikolaevich is depicted in a loose shirt, called a “sweatshirt”.
IN last years The writer’s life was painted by Ilya Repin many times. He created portraits and story paintings, which showed old Tolstoy in action, in motion. Among them, the painting “Tolstoy on arable land” is especially popular. What do you think is the reason for such popularity?
At the time when the portrait was painted, Tolstoy preached the idea of simplification, approaching peasant labor, rural life. Tolstoy sought to learn from the people their wisdom and comprehend their philosophy. In addition, Repin’s skill made it possible to convey not only the writer’s clothes and his occupation of work unusual for a nobleman, but also the movement of his thoughts, the state of spirituality at the moment of introduction to peasant labor.
How do you evaluate Leo Tolstoy as a reader, since you are familiar with the lists of works he has read and highly rated? Do you think Tolstoy would have included in these lists those works that he did not like at all, or did he not name them simply because the books that he did not like did not remain in his memory?
Returning to the words of John Amos Comenius, Tolstoy showed here such an important skill of the reader as the ability to choose a book. It is precisely because of their moral influence on the formation of a young person that books were included in this list. Here are the Sermon on the Mount (Gospel), works of Russian and world classics, especially A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, I. S. Turgenev. He did not set himself the task of adding to this list all the books he read that he liked or did not like; he included works that shocked him spiritually and influenced his moral beliefs.
1. Set a goal and stick to it
April, 1847, Kazan. House on Chernoozerskaya Street, in the yard a dog barks to the tune of the song “Only” by singer Nyusha. Climbs into the apartment window spring sun. A guy sits at a table with short hair And big ears, his name is Leo. In front of him is a notebook. Look what is written there: “The worse the situation, the more you intensify your activity.” And one more thing: “Overcome melancholy with work, not with entertainment.” 19-year-old Leo spent the entire month of March being treated for gonorrhea, and then he came up with and wrote down rules for himself that he was going to follow in his life. So Tolstoy began to keep a diary. Do you think that after a couple of weeks he forgot about this idea and became interested in breeding Djungarian hamsters? Tolstoy wrote down his thoughts about his life and actions until his death at 82! You can trace his determination and desire for self-improvement, for example, in the “Selected Diaries”, which were published by the Khudozhestvennaya Literatura publishing house from 1978 to 1985 (21 volumes!).
2. Was brave
Autumn 1851, Chechnya, a place near Kizlyar. The Terek River is seething and goes around the bend, somewhere behind the forest the mountaineers are cleaning their gun barrels. On our shore, a Cossack sleeps as if he had been shot, and the cadet of the 4th battery of the 20th artillery brigade, Lev Tolstoy, watches the sun go down behind the mountains. The writer (by definition, a peaceful person) was distinguished by enviable courage on the battlefield. In 1851 Lev went to Caucasian war, and then became a member of the Crimean. From 1854 to 1855, he defended Sevastopol, commanded a battery that was located on the 4th bastion - one of the most dangerous places. Enemy shells fell there so often that it seemed like some kind of natural phenomenon, like snow in winter. When Lev retired in 1856, the Order of St. Anne and the medal “For the Defense of Sevastopol” hung on his chest.
3. Always fought with myself
Yasnaya Polyana, Tula region, summer 1860. Leo has already grown a beard, large ears hide his hair. He steps along the path. Around green Forest, and in Tolstoy’s eyes there is something elusive. Pondering the fate of local peasants? Not at all. “I wandered around in the garden with a vague, voluptuous hope of catching someone in the bush. Nothing prevents me from working like that,” Tolstoy later wrote about such days. Leo considered his passion for women to be one of his main vices - he either defeated it or lost again in this struggle, which dragged on for many years. As a result, his love for the fairer sex benefited world literature and cinema. As you probably know, main character novel "Anna Karenina" (published in 1878) - a woman. This work by Leo Tolstoy was directed by different countries the world has already been filmed 30 times - the first version of the film was released in 1910, and the last in 2012 (directed by Joe Wright, in leading role Keira Knightley).
4. Wasn't afraid of experiments
In 1859, Leo Tolstoy opened a strange school for peasant children right on his estate. Tolstoy, imagine, was sure that studying should be purely pleasure. “Education cannot be forced and should be enjoyable for students” - that’s what he wrote. In addition to Lev himself, four more people taught at the Yasnaya Polyana school. They were obliged not to hammer knowledge into children, but to interest them in lessons. Schoolchildren could choose which classes to attend, students were allowed to come to classes at any time and leave school whenever they wanted.
Who's with the beard?
Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 in the family estate Yasnaya Polyana in Tula region. He died of pneumonia on November 20, 1910 in the house of the head of the Astapovo railway station (now Leo Tolstoy, Lipetsk region).
Tolstoy, How do you imagine Leo Tolstoy?
How do you imagine Leo Tolstoy? What seems most important to you in his attitude towards himself and towards the people around him?
Leo Tolstoy lived a long and complex life, in which there were many turning points that changed the writer’s worldview and his aesthetic positions. The main thing in Tolstoy’s character was a constant search for truth, the meaning of human existence. This is present in the early stories “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”, and in the most recent works of a philosophical nature, in which he affirms the idea of self-improvement and non-resistance to evil through violence. The struggle between good and evil constantly worried Tolstoy as a person and a writer.
There is a huge collection of portraits of Leo Tolstoy: he was painted, sculpted, sculpted, photographed. Which of the portraits you know, in your opinion, most accurately reproduces not only his appearance, but also the spiritual qualities of this unusual person?
The portrait of L. N. Tolstoy by I. N. Kramskoy from 1873 is memorable. The writer is 45 years old. He's already famous
author of “Sevastopol Stories”, an autobiographical trilogy, the novel “War and Peace”, permanent resident of Yasnaya Polyana. The artist perfectly conveys the intensity of Tolstoy’s thoughts, sharp gaze, and internal energy. Lev Nikolaevich is depicted in a loose shirt, called a “sweatshirt”.
In the last years of the writer’s life, Ilya Repin painted him many times. He created portraits and narrative paintings that showed the old Tolstoy in action, in movement. Among them, the painting “Tolstoy on arable land” is especially popular. What do you think is the reason for such popularity?
At the time when the portrait was painted, Tolstoy preached the idea of simplification, approaching peasant labor and rural life. Tolstoy sought to learn from the people their wisdom and comprehend their philosophy. In addition, Repin’s skill made it possible to convey not only the writer’s clothes and his occupation of work unusual for a nobleman, but also the movement of his thoughts, the state of spirituality at the moment of introduction to peasant labor.
How do you evaluate Leo Tolstoy as a reader, since you are familiar with the lists of works he has read and highly rated? Do you think Tolstoy would have included in these lists those works that he did not like at all, or did he not name them simply because the books that he did not like did not remain in his memory?
Returning to the words of John Amos Comenius, Tolstoy showed here such an important skill of the reader as the ability to choose a book. It is precisely because of their moral influence on the formation of a young person that books were included in this list. Here are the Sermon on the Mount (Gospel), works of Russian and world classics, especially A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, I. S. Turgenev. He did not set himself the task of adding to this list all the books he read that he liked or did not like; he included works that shocked him spiritually and influenced his moral beliefs.
Glossary:
- How do you imagine Leo Tolstoy
- how I imagine fat
- characteristics of Leo Tolstoy as a person and writer
- how I imagine Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy essay
- how fat he was, choose the most accurate words
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