Leo Tolstoy

The Russian lion

Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
 

 

This is a list of  works by Leo Tolstoy    (1828-1910). His  full works were  published in  ninety volumes in quarto  in the mid- 20th century.

 

Note: the underlined files lead to Wikipedia

 

Childhood  1852)

The Raid  (1852)

Boyhood  1854)

Youth  1856)

Sebastopol Sketches  1855–56 )

Family Happiness   (1859)

The Cossacks   1863)

Ivan the Fool : A  Lost Opportunity (1863)  

Polikushka  (1863)

War and Peace   1865–69 ) ****

A Prisoner in the Caucasus  1872)

Father Sergius   1873)

Anna Karenina   1875–77 ) ****

A Confession   (1882)

Strider: The Story of a Horse  (1864 , 1886 )

What I Believe (also called  My  Religion) (1884)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Death of Ivan Ilyich 1886)

What Men Live By (1885)

How Much Land Does a Man Need?; 1886)

The Power of Darkness 1886), drama

The Fruits of Culture (play) (1889)

The Kreutzer Sonata and other stories]; 1889)

The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894) ****

Master and Man and other stories (1895)

The Gospel in Brief (1896) ****

What Is Art? (1897) ***

Letter to the Liberals (1898)

Resurrection 1899) ******

A Calendar of Wisdom]; 1910)

The Living Corpse]; published 1911), drama

Hadji Murat]; written in 1896-1904, published 1912)

 

Resurrection

Perhaps his greatest novel was written in 1899. Thanks to Wikipedia.com see above.

 

The story is about a nobleman named Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, who seeks redemption for a sin committed years earlier. His brief affair with a maid resulted in her being fired and ending up in prostitution. The book treats his attempts to help her out of her current misery, but also focuses on his personal mental and moral struggle.

Framed for murder, the maid, Maslova, is convicted by mistake, sent to Siberia. Nekhlyudov goes to visit her in prison, meets other prisoners, hears their stories, and slowly comes to realize that all around his charmed and golden aristocratic world, yet invisible to it, is a much larger world of oppression, misery and barbarism. Story after story he hears and even sees of people chained without cause, beaten without cause, immured in dungeons for life without cause -- and all punctuated like lightning flashes by startling vignettes -- a ten year old boy sleeping in a lake of human dung from an overflowing latrine because there is no other place on the prison floor, but clinging in a vain search for love to the leg of the man next to him -- until the book achieves the bizarre intensity of a horrific fever dream.

 

Few books sold better. It outsold Anna Karenina, outsold War and Peace. And yet, while Anna Karenina has become, like Hamlet and Oliver Twist, more famous than real people, like Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, who once ruled half the world, Resurrection is more or less forgotten.

 

Those modern-day critics who write about Resurrection deem it second-rate because they say the characters are stick figures created to make a point. They don't have that tang of reality, the critics say, they don't live on their own. But in his guilt (which surely isn't half as cloying as the far more famous Raskolnikov's), in his philosophy, even in the chance fact of having ruined the life of a maid and later feeling guilty about it, Nekhlyudov's life copies Tolstoy's own. And the characters are indeed uncomfortably real, and what they do is unpredictable. There are no saints here. Even the girl, Maslova, has fits of petty anger, jealousy, times when she drinks far too much liquor and then does God knows what.

So why forgotten? Hovering around the edges of every page is the fearsome idea that all of society, everything that the reader loves and most admires, is all a trick, a shambling, lumbering sham whose only purpose is to allow the exploitation of the poor by the rich.

A vast "justice" system has come into being which allows moral men -- lawyers, judges, prison guards, prisoners, even you, gentle reader -- to perpetrate barbaric outrages day after day after day and feel not guilt but pride in their work. A sharp, incisive and sarcastic account of a prison chapel service is followed by "it never occurred to anyone here that what was going on was the greatest blasphemy and mockery" -- and this is elaborated in great detail, page after page, language so lacerating he outdoes Voltaire. It is possible that many contemporaneous critics were offended.  The complete and accurate text was not published until 1936. Much was cut by the Russian censors, and much was added to the over 50 pirated versions of the novel. Some publishers even added love scenes to increase sales. Many publishers printed their own editions because they assumed that Tolstoy had given up all copyrights as he had done with previous books. Instead, Tolstoy kept the copyright and donated all royalties to Doukhobors, who were Russian pacifists hoping to emigrate to Canada.

His final years brought much unhappiness in his marriage.

She wanted to protect his copyrights – he was too generous

 

His work The Kingdom of God is Within You, shares some similarities with Buddhism, and which inspired Rainer Maria Rilke and a young Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi whose influence extended out to Martin Luther King. The non violent philosophy of Tolstoy transcends more movements than many people may be accustomed to think. His influence was also felt and practiced by Nelson Mandela

 

Extract of the Sermon on the Mount from Tolstoy’s translation of the gospels

 

Blessed are the poor and the homeless, for they live in the will of the Father.  If they are hungry they will be satisfied and if they sorrow and weep they shall be comforted.  If people despise them, thrust them aside and drive them away, let them be glad of it, for so God’s people have always been treated and they will receive a heavenly reward.

But woe to the rich, for they have already got what they wanted and will get nothing more.  Now they are satisfied, but they too will be hungry.  Now they rejoice but they too will be sad.  Woe to those whom everyone praises, for only deceivers are praised by everyone.

Blessed are the poor and homeless; but blessed only if they are poor not outwardly but in spirit - just as salt is good only when it has saltiness in it and is not salt merely in appearance.

So you also, the poor and homeless, are the teachers of the world; you are blessed if you know that true happiness is in being homeless and poor. But if you are poor only outwardly then, like salt that has no savour, you are good for nothing.  You are the light of the world, therefore do not hide your light but let men see it.  When a man lights a candle he does not put it under the bench but on the table that it should give light to everyone in the room.  So you too, should not hide your light but show it by your actions, that men may see that you have the truth and seeing your good deeds may understand your heavenly Father.

 

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The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.