Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Paksoy, H. B. (1995). “Basmachi Movement from Within: Account of Zeki Velidi Togan.” Nationalities Papers 23:373-399. Schafer, Daniel E. (2001). “Local Politics and the Birth of the Republic of Bashkortostan, 1919-1920.” In A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Era of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin. New York: Oxford University Press.

  DANIEL E. SCHAFER

  TOLSTAYA, TATIANA NIKITICHNA

  (b. 1951), Russian writer.

  Tolstaya is an original, captivating fiction writer of the perestroika and post-Soviet period. Born in 1951 in Leningrad, she graduated from Leningrad State University with a degree in Philology and Classics, then worked as an editor at Nauka before publishing her first short stories in the early 1980s. Their imaginative brilliance and humane depth won success with both Soviet and international readers. Her activities expanded subsequently to include university teaching (at Skidmore College, among other institutions), journalistic writing, and completion of a dark futuristic novel, The Slynx.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  Tolstaya’s initial impact on Russian letters was made by a series of short stories centering on the conflict between imagination, spirit, and value, on the one hand, and a bleak social order of conformity and consumerism, cultural and spiritual degradation, and rapacious and cynical materialism on the other. Although she draws on the texture of late Soviet reality with witty, acerbic penetration, her critique of modern society travels well. The mythical dimensions of this conflict are highlighted in her stories by frequent use of fantastic elements and folkloric allusions, such as the transformation of the self-centered Serafim into Gorynych the Dragon (Serafim), or the bird of death, Sirin, symbolizing Petya’s loss of innocence in “Date with a Bird.”

  Her most notable stories are works of virtuosic invention. Denisov of the Dantesque “Sleepwalker in the Mist” awakens in mid-life surrounded by dark woods and takes up the search for meaning; his various attempts at creation, leadership, and sacrifice ending in farce. Peters of “Peters” is a lumpish being without attraction or charm (one coworker calls him “some kind of endocrinal dodo”) who spends his life in quixotic search of romantic love; in old age, beaten down by humiliation, he triumphs by his praise of life: “indifferent, ungrateful, lying, teasing, senseless, alien-beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” Sonia of “Sonia” is a halfwitted, unattractive, but selfless creature, tormented by her sophisticated friends through the fiction of a married admirer, Nikolai, whom she can never meet. The fabrication is kept up through years of correspondence in which the chief tormentor, Ada, finds her womanhood irresistibly subverted. In the Leningrad blockade Sonia gives her life to save Ada/Nikolai, without realizing the fiction.

  The fantastic elements in Tolstaya’s works have led to comparisons with the magical realism of modern Latin American fiction, comparisons which are only roughly valid. The association of Tolstaya’s work with the women’s prose (zhen-skaya proza) of late Soviet literature also requires qualification: although women are frequently protagonists in her stories as impaired visionaries and saints, they are just as often the objects of bitter satire, implacable enforcers of social conventionality.

  Tolstaya’s remarkable novel The Slynx depicts a post-nuclear Moscow populated by mutants, combining the political traits of the Tatar Yoke and Muscovite Russia with characteristics of Stalinist

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  TOLSTOY, ALEXEI KONSTANTINOVICH

  and later Soviet regimes. The narrative, displaying to advantage Tolstaya’s humor and ear for popular language, presents a negative Bildungsroman. The uncouth but decent and robust protagonist, Benedikt, given favorable circumstances including a library, leisure to read, and friends from the earlier times, fails to develop and cross the line from animal existence to spiritual, and as a consequence the culture itself fails to regain organic life. This pessimistic historical vision seems rooted in the disappointments of post-Soviet Russian political and social life. See also: PERESTROIKA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Goscilo, Helena. (1996). The Explosive World of Ta.tya.na N. Tolstaya’s Fiction. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (1989). On the Golden Porch, tr. An-tonina W. Bouis. New York: Knopf. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (1992). Sleepwalker in a Fog, tr. Jamey Gambrell. New York: Knopf. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (2003). Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians, tr. Jamey Gambrell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (2003). The Slynx, tr. Jamey Gambrell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

  HAROLD D. BAKER

  Russian State, from which he lifted passages verbatim for his own work.

  Tolstoy’s lyric poetry, most notably “Against the Current” (1867) and “John Damascene” (1858), were strongly influenced by German romanticism. He also wrote satirical verse. Collaborating with the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, he created the fictional writer Kozma Prutkov, a petty bureaucrat who parodied the poetry of the day and wrote banal aphorisms. Karamzin’s History also served as the inspiration for Tolstoy’s History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev, a parody of Russian history from its founding until 1868, which contained vicious characteristics of the Russian monarch. The manuscript circulated privately between 1868, when it was completed, and 1883, when it first appeared in print. See also: KARAMZIN, NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bartlett, Rosamund. (1998). “Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi 1817-1875.” In Reference Guide to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell, 806-808. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Dalton, Margaret. (1972). A. K. Tolstoy. New York: Twayne.

  ELIZABETH JONES HEMENWAY

  TOLSTOY, ALEXEI KONSTANTINOVICH

  (1817-1875), writer of drama, fiction, and poetry; considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist.

  A member of the Russian nobility, Alexei Tolstoy was expected to serve at court and in the diplomatic service, which prevented him from writing full time until relatively late in his life (1861). Nevertheless, he managed to produce a novel (Prince Serebryanny, 1862) and a dramatic trilogy (The Death of Ivan the Terrible, 1866; Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, 1868; Tsar Boris, 1870), both based on the time of Ivan the Terrible. Although, by the time Prince Serebryanny was published, the fad for historical novels had long passed, it nevertheless enjoyed some popularity. Due to censorship restrictions, only the first of the three plays was performed during the author’s lifetime, but all three were produced numerous times during the Soviet period. For all these works, Tolstoy relied on Karamzin’s History of the

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  TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

  (1828-1910), Russian prose writer and, in his later years, dissident and religious leader, best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

  CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH (1828-1852)

  The fourth son of Count Nikolai Ilich Tolstoy and Princess Maria Nikolaevich Volkonskaya, Tolstoy was born into the highest echelon of Russian nobility. Despite the early deaths of his mother (1830) and father (1837), Tolstoy led the typically idyllic childhood of a nineteenth-century aristocrat. He spent virtually every summer of his life at his family’s ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana, located about 130 miles (200 kilometers) south of Moscow.

  Although he initially flunked entrance exams in history and geography, Tolstoy entered Kazan University in 1844. He was dismissed from the department of Oriental languages after failing his first

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

  Leo Tolstoy sitting at his desk in Yasnaya Polyana in 1908. © CORBIS semester’s final examinations. He reentered the next year to pursue a law degree, and, two years later, knowing that he was about to be dismissed once again, he requested leave for reasons of spoiled health and domestic circumstances. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana with grandiose plans for self-improvement, experiments in estate management, and philanthropic projects. Over the next few years, he made little headway on these plans, but he did manage to acquire large
gambling debts, a bad reputation, and several bouts of venereal disease. He also began keeping a detailed diary that, with some significant lapses, he kept for his entire life. These journal entries occupy twelve volumes, each several hundred pages long, of his Complete Collected Works.

  EARLY LITERARY WORKS AND YASNAYA POLYANA SCHOOL

  Tolstoy’s first published work, Childhood (1852), appeared in the influential journal The Contemporary, and was signed simply “L.N.” The work was enthusiastically praised for the complex psychological analysis and description conveyed by the work’s seemingly simple style and episodic, nearly plotless, structure. The five years after the publication of Childhood saw Tolstoy’s literary star rise: he published sequels to Childhood (Boyhood [1852-1864] andYouth [1857]) and a handful of war stories. (Tolstoy had enlisted as an artillery cadet in 1852 and seen action in the Caucasus and later in the Russo-Turkish war). Almost without exception, the stories enjoyed success with both critics and readers.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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  TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

  In 1857 Tolstoy left the army as a decorated veteran and traveled Europe, where he wrote a run of poorly received stories and novellas that were praised for their artistry but sharply criticized for their plainspoken condemnation of civilization and apathy toward the burning questions of the day. In part because of this criticism Tolstoy announced in 1859 his renunciation of literary activity, declared himself forevermore dedicated to educating the masses of Russia, and founded a school for peasant boys at Yasnaya Polyana, which he directed until its closure in 1863. Tolstoy produced few literary works during this time, though he wrote several articles on pedagogy in the journal Yasnaya Polyana, which he published privately. This was not the last time Tolstoy was involved in education. A decade after closing the second Yasnaya Polyana school he began an educational series The New Russian Primer for Reading, and spent nearly two decades working on it. The primer sold more than a million copies, making it the most read and most profitable of Tolstoy’s works during his lifetime.

  MARRIAGE AND THE GREAT NOVELS (1862-1877)

  In the fall of 1862 Tolstoy married Sofya An-dreevna Behrs, the daughter of a former playmate and a girl half his age. Their marriage of nearly fifty years produced ten offspring who survived childhood and several who did not. Though tumultuous, their early relationship was mostly happy. In 1863 Tolstoy closed his school and commenced work on his magnum opus, War and Peace (1863-1869). Partly a historical account of the period from 1805 to 1812, partly a novelistic description of quotidian life of fictional characters, and partly a historiographical animadversion on conventional historical accounts, War and Peace was initially perceived as defying generic convention, sharing characteristics with the didactic essay, history, epic, and novel. Perhaps reflecting its chaotic structure, War and Peace portrays war as intensely chaotic. It ridicules the tsar’s and military strategists’ self-aggrandizing claims that they were responsible for the Russians’ victory over la Grande Arm?e. The sole effective commander was General Mikhail Kutuzov, who in previous historical accounts had been portrayed as an inept blunderer. In the novel he is depicted as the ideal commander inasmuch as his modus operandi derives from the maxim “patience and time”-that is, he relies little on plans and military science, and instead on a mix of instincts and resignation to fate. The true

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  heroes of the war, the novel contends, were instead individual Russians-soldiers, peasants, nobles, townspeople-who reacted instinctively and unconsciously, yet successfully, to an invasion of their homeland.

  In 1873 Tolstoy began his second great novel, Anna Karenina (1873-1878), which has one of the most famous first lines in world literature: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The novel’s unhappy families are the Karenins, Aleksey and Anna, and the Oblonskys, Stiva (Anna’s brother) and Dolly. Anna feels herself trapped in marriage to her boring if devoted husband, and begins an affair with an attractive if dim officer named Vronsky. Aleksey denies Anna’s request for a divorce, and she decides defiantly to live openly with Vronsky. Their illicit affair is simultaneously condemned and celebrated by society. Stiva is a charismatic sybarite who philanders through life taking advantage of Dolly’s innocence and preoccupation looking after the household. The third, happy couple of the novel, Konstantin Levin and Kitty (Dolly’s youngest sister), are unmarried at the beginning of the story. Their inconstant courtship and eventual marriage take place mostly as the background to the drama of the Oblonskys and Karenins. The novel ends with Anna, nearly insane from guilt and stress, throwing herself beneath a train. Levin, now a family man, undergoes a religious conversion when he realizes that his constant preoccupation with questions of life and death, combined with an innate inclination to philosophize, had prevented his seeing the miraculous simplicity of life itself.

  CONVERSION AND LATE WORKS

  Notwithstanding his sensual temperament, Tolstoy had always suffered from sporadic bouts of intense desire to adopt an ascetic’s life. While still at work on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy began A Confession (1875-1884), the first-person narrative of a man- very similar to Levin at the end of Anna Karenina- who, despite his success and seeming happiness, finds himself in the throes of depression and suicidal thoughts from which he is rescued by religion. Although the rhetoric of the work suggests a radical conversion-Tolstoy later described the time as an “ardent inner perestroika of my whole outlook on life”-some critics have cast doubt on the fun-damentality of the conversion. As early as 1855, for instance, Tolstoy wrote in his diary plans to create a new religion “cleansed of faith and mysENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

  tery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth.”

  Tolstoy spent the 1880s and 1890s developing his religious views in a series of works: A Critique of Dogmatic Theology (1880), A Translation and Unification of the Gospels (1881), What I Believe (1884), and The Kingdom of God Is within You (1893). Most of these works were banned by the religious or secular censor in Russia, but were either printed illegally in Russia or printed abroad and clandestinely smuggled in, thus adumbrating the fate of many Soviet works printed as samizat or tamizdat. The core of Tolstoy’s belief is contained in God’s commandments in the Sermon on the Mount: do not resist evil, swear no oaths, do not lust, bear no malice, love your enemy. Tolstoy is everywhere and at pains to point out that adherence to these injunctions, especially nonresistance to evil, inevitably leads to the abolition of all compulsory legislation, police, prisons, armies, and, ultimately, to the abolition of the state itself. He described his beliefs as Christian-anarchism. Vladimir Nabokov described them as a neutral blend between a kind of Hindu Nirvana and the New Testament, and indeed Tolstoy himself considered his beliefs as a syncretic reconciliation of Christianity with all the wisdom of the ages, especially Taoism and Stoicism. Following this creed, Tolstoy became a vegetarian; gave up smoking, drinking, and hunting; and partially renounced the privileges of his class-for instance, he often wore peasant garb, embraced physical labor as a necessary part of a moral life, and refused to take part in social functions that he deemed corrupt.

  His new life led to increased strife with his wife and family, who did not share Tolstoy’s convictions. It also attracted international attention. Beginning in the 1880s, hundreds of journalists, wisdom-seekers, and tourists trekked to Yasnaya Polyana to meet the now-famous Russian writer-turned-prophet. Tolstoy, who had always kept up extensive correspondence with friends and family, was inundated with letters from the curious and questing. In his lifetime he wrote 10,000 letters and received 50,000. In 1891 he renounced copyright over many of his literary works. Free of copyright restriction and royalties, publishing houses around the world issued impressive runs of Tolstoy’s works almost immediately upon their official publication in Russia. In 1901 his international fame was increased when Tolstoy was excommun
icated for blasphemy from the Russian Orthodox Church. In addition to works on philosophy, religion, and social criticism, Tolstoy penned during the last decades of his life a number of works of the highest literary merit, notably the novella The Death of Ivan Ilich (1882), the affecting story of a man forced to admit the meaninglessness of his own life in the face of impending death; and Hadji Mu-rat (1896-1904, published posthumously), a beautifully wrought but uncompleted novel set during the Russian imperialistic expansion in the Caucasus. Tolstoy’s third long novel, Resurrection (1889-1899), though inferior in artistic quality to his other novels, is a compelling casuistical account of a man’s attempt to undo the wrongs he has committed. Tolstoy also wrote an influential and debated body of art criticism. What Is Art? (1896-1898) attacked art for not fulfilling its true mission, namely, the uniting of people into a universal collective. His On Shakespeare and Drama (1903-1904) dismissed Shakespeare as a charlatan.

  Increasingly distressed by domestic conflict and angst over the incommensurability of his life with his beliefs, Tolstoy left home in secrecy in the autumn of 1910. His flight was immediately broadcast by the international media, which succeeded in tracking him down to the railway stop Astapovo (later renamed Leo Tolstoy), where he lay dying of congestive heart failure brought on by pneumonia. What could only be described as a media circus was assembled outside the stationmaster’s house when Tolstoy died early in the morning of November 7, 1910. His final words were “Truth, I love much.” See also: ANARCHISM; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Eikhenbaum, Boris. (1972). The Young Tolstoy, tr. Gary Kern. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Eikhenbaum, Boris. (1982). Tolstoi in the Sixties, tr. Duffield White. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Eikhenbaum, Boris. (1982). Tolstoi in the Seventies, tr. Albert Kaspin. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Gustafson, Richard F. (1986). Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Morson, G. S. (1987). Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Orwin, Donna Tussing. (1993). Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847-1880. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.