How Tolstoy died: date and cause of death of the writer

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Tolstoy is the national pride of his people. It is difficult to overestimate his services to Russian and world culture. Gorky rightly wrote:

He told us about Russian life almost as much as the rest of our literature. The historical significance of Tolstoy's work is already understood as the result of everything experienced by Russian society over the entire 19th century, and his books will remain for centuries, as a monument to hard work done by a genius…

Not only as a writer, but also as a thinker and public figure, Tolstoy did an incredible amount for the development of thought; in his writings, he collected and expressed all the characteristic features, moods of his era, and his personality is itself a reflection of the time in which he lived. Therefore, not only creativity, but also the biography of Tolstoy is of interest to numerous researchers. And to tell how Leo Tolstoy died, a brief retelling of his life is needed.

Stages of Tolstoy's life

The life and work of Leo Tolstoy is usually divided into several periods.

He spent his childhood in Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate of his mother (who died of puerperal fever when Tolstoy was not even two years old). Then the family moved to Moscow, three years later - to Kazan, where Tolstoy entered the university. True, he did not finish his studies there, he left the Faculty of Law andcame back to his estate. There he tried to make changes that would improve the life of the peasants (at the same time he opened the famous Yasnaya Polyana school), but he succeeded little and again left for Moscow. In Moscow, he led a secular chaotic life, was fond of gambling, and because of this, he was subsequently forced to leave for the Caucasus in order to cut costs and improve his financial situation.

It was in the Caucasus that Tolstoy first turned to literary activity. Then he wrote a semi-autobiographical story "Childhood", after Nekrasov's positive reviews about it (who worked in Sovremennik, which published the work), he set about continuing. Already in connection with the first parts of the trilogy, many critics and writers noted the extraordinary accuracy of the psychological portraits created by Tolstoy. The "democratic trend", which later became the main one in Tolstoy's work, is still far away, but this theme has already emerged here in the characters of the servants of the noble house.

With the beginning of the Crimean War, he leaves to serve in Sevastopol, and his "Sevastopol stories" appear there - it was in them that his deep interest in the people was most clearly expressed in Tolstoy's early work.

After a creative crisis and the unsuccessful novel "Family Happiness" Tolstoy rethinks his views, and his work takes a slightly different direction. In 1862, "Cossacks" appear, where for the first time the depraved and idle life of the upper strata of society is contrasted with the simple, labor,life close to nature. Subsequently, this folk life, close to primitive, alien to the corrupting action of civilization, will become the ideal of the writer, to whom, before he died, Tolstoy devoted most of his literary and social activity.

In "War and Peace" Tolstoy further developed this idea of people's life, of the spontaneous movement of the masses, which determines the entire world history and order.

Tipping point

At the end of the seventies, Tolstoy completed a turning point in his worldview. He talks about this in his treatise "Confessions". The elements of the crisis accumulated gradually, it was a long process of revising all the old beliefs and beliefs and at the same time clarifying and defining a new ideological position.

Breaking from his aristocratic-gentry environment, Tolstoy became the spokesman for the interests of the patriarchal peasantry. From the position of this peasantry, he subjected to merciless criticism all the contemporary orders of autocratic Russia and bourgeois society in general. Rejecting the foundations of this society, Tolstoy speaks of hostility to their natural needs of man, his very nature.

For the rest of his life (and, remembering what year Tolstoy died, this is more than 30 years), the writer will follow his convictions.

Tolstoyanism

At the same time, in his articles, he sets out his religious and ethical teaching - the "new religion", or "purified Christianity", and launches a great activity to spread it among the broad masses of the people.

Principlesnew teachings in many respects coincide with Christian ones. Most broadly, Tolstoy preaches "non-resistance to evil by violence", "non-doing", which consists in the struggle against the existing order, their non-observance, the rejection of the life dictated by bourgeois society. He denies the significance of the achievements of culture, science and religion and believes that the main asset of man is simplicity; sings of hard peasant physical labor.

According to Tolstoy, it was his teaching that was called upon to save humanity from all social disasters, destroy evil on earth and establish fraternal unity of people.

Parables and stories

To spread his teachings, Tolstoy writes both journalistic articles and works of art. Having in mind the "readers from the people", for whom his literature was intended, Tolstoy develops a completely new style of his "folk stories": extremely simple in form and content, they are imbued with his ideas, in all with various variations, the idea of the need for a "good life" is affirmed. ", about love for one's neighbor, about Christian forgiveness and repentance for one's sins. In fact, they resemble evangelical sermons, which undoubtedly lost all the features of Tolstoy's prose before the turning point - an in-depth and intense psychological analysis that was the basis of his former artistic method.

Literary creativity

However, along with such short stories in the last stages of his life, Tolstoy also creates literary works that are really significant for Russian culture:the story "Hadji Murad" (never finished), the drama "The Living Corpse", the story "After the Ball". They combine both the deep psychologism developed by Tolstoy and the new accusatory pathos, criticism of the existing way of life and human relations.

Yasnaya Polyana

Tolstoy finally settled in his family estate back in the sixties (but even after that he visited Moscow and St. Petersburg). Even then, he enthusiastically set about the transformation, hoping to improve the life of the peasants and create good living conditions. However, the gap between the landowner and the serfs was then too great, and he did not succeed (later the writer will try to comprehend his failures in the story "Morning of the Landowner"), but his Yasnaya Polyana school for peasant children aroused great interest. Tolstoy's unique educational experiment was a great success and became the subject of study for many pedagogical schools.

In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya Andreevna, and it was thanks to this heroic woman that the house in the estate acquired the form in which we know it (or rather, the outbuilding that remained after the sale of the large Yasnaya Polyana house). Also, Tolstoy himself planted many apple orchards and forests that decorated the estate.

During that period of his life and until his death, Tolstoy himself worked a lot on the territory of his estate and on land in accordance with his ideas aboutennobling peasant labor.

Care

The story begins directly about how Leo Tolstoy died.

The last years of Tolstoy's life were overshadowed by the deterioration of relations with his wife. Despite the large circulations in which the writer's books were published, his large family was always in a difficult financial situation: under the influence of all the same ideas, Tolstoy renounced property rights to everything he wrote, and sometimes it was not easy for Sofya Alexandrovna to find means of subsistence. In addition, she did not agree with all the judgments of her husband, and disagreements in this area also did not strengthen marital happiness.

In the end, sometimes fearing for Tolstoy's mental he alth and in order to avoid new unusual actions on his part, Sofya Andreevna begins to literally follow him, like a small child. Tolstoy notices this, and more and more moves away from his family. He begins to keep a new, secret diary, which he hides from everyone.

In the end, Tolstoy decides that he must conform to the ideas of his teaching as completely as possible; Having come to this conclusion, he understands the impossibility of his further stay in the estate, and on the night of October 28, 1910, he secretly leaves Yasnaya Polyana. He wants to go to the southern provinces and start a peasant life there. In a note left in the name of Sofya Andreevna, he writes that he can no longer lead a life that runs counter to his convictions, and asks not to look for him and not to disturb him.

Tolstoy's journey began by rail, at Kozlov stationNotch. Together with him was his doctor Makovetsky. First, he went to Kozelsk, to Optina Pustyn, where he had not been for 17 years, to talk with the elders. By that time he had already been excommunicated from the church. Then the writer went to the nearby Shamarda Convent, where his sister Maria lived.

The daughter of Alexander Tolstaya found him there. Together with her, he returned from the monastery to Kozelsk and boarded a train there. On the way to Astapovo station, he develops a fever; the writer has to get off the train.

How Tolstoy died

At five o'clock in the morning on November 20 (7), 1910, there was a sharp deterioration in the condition. Near the patient by that time was the whole family. The exact answer to the question of when Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy died is 6:50 in the morning: the patient, without uttering a single word, died. He died without regaining consciousness.

The place where Leo Tolstoy died is the Astapovo station of the Ryazan-Ural railway. Now there is a museum here.

The reasons why Tolstoy died indicate pneumonia, which the body weakened by old age could not bear.

Tolstoy's grave

The writer bequeathed to bury himself without a grave. And on November 9, his funeral took place in Yasnaya Polyana - a civil one, since Tolstoy died, remaining excommunicated from the church. The grave of the writer has neither a cross nor a tombstone, it is only a small mound on the edge of a ravine in the Old Order forest.

The tradition of the modern museum of Yasnaya Polyana is complete silence, which is observed by all visitors on the alley leading toTolstoy's grave, and near her.

The entire world community started up after these events. His departure and death throughout 1910 were covered in newspapers throughout Europe. Many Russian writers celebrated this event with their notes or full-fledged essays-memoirs. V. Ya. Bryusov, who was present at the burial, wrote in the article “At the funeral of Tolstoy. Impressions and observations”:

Future generations will learn a lot about Tolstoy that we do not know. But how they will envy everyone who had the opportunity to see him, talk to him, get any closer to the great man, and even those who, like me, could collect information about Tolstoy from those who knew him personally! Now that Tolstoy is gone, we begin to understand how much it meant to be his contemporary!

Now you know what year Leo Tolstoy died, under what circumstances.