Tolstoy

5 Pages 1283 Words

Leo Tolstoy stood out from most writers of yesterday and today. His works were based on the happenings around him whether it involved government, religion, or even romance. Leo Tolstoy faced many problems in life. Starting at an early age to the day he died, he took on all obstacles. Tolstoy was a man respected by almost everyone. He stood strong for what he believed in and did what he could to help someone out, no matter what the consequences were.
On September 23, 1862, at the age of 34, Tolstoy married 18-year-old Sophia Behrs, the youngest daughter of a wealthy family whom he had watched grow up. During their early days of marriage, he conceived the idea of a novel based on the Decembrists, a group of noble families who attempted to bring the idea of a constitution to state attention in December 1825. As soon as he started doing research on their work, however, the whole period of the Napoleonic wars unfolded. The novel was to eventually become Tolstoy's great epic, War and Peace. The novel was serialized over a period of five years, 1864-1869, and at first the critics were completely baffled by it. Even Turgenev was unsure of the novel's importance. It did not gain critical adoration until a number of years after it was completed.
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's next work, was based on the real-life case of a young woman Tolstoy knew. She was a young society woman who threw herself under a train over what was then called "a romance." The novel was serialized during 1873-1876 and was widely regarded as a triumph. At the time of Anna Karenina's composition, Tolstoy was undergoing another important stage in his religious process. He was questioning the integrity of the Greek Orthodox Church and the morality of the Russian society world; those questions are brought to fore in this work.
Throughout the composition of Anna Karenina and later works including Resurrection and the masterful short novel The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, Tolstoy was...