Leo Tolstoy’s Art

Tolstoy is one of those writers whose bearing intervened in his literary activity the events from actually life influenced the specificity of themes and topics, raised in his works. He practiced various genres from novels, piffling-circuit stories to non-fiction letters.The beginning of his work as a writer coincided with his military service. The inaugural considerable writing took six year to be completed. It was a trilogy that consisted of ternion novels dealing with different period of life of a person puerility (1852), Boyhood, (1854) and Adolescence (1857). The first novel of the trilogy in a lyrical and enchanting vogue describes the innocence and joy of life through childs-eye view. The trilogy is autobiographical and presents the psychological and virtuous development of the hero from age ten to his late teens.After Tolstoy left soldiers in 1856 he streng pasted himself as a talented participator of Russian literary processes. His military experience, gained in Cri mean warfargon, served him as a prolific initiation of material for new literary works, and consequently was employed for a figure of short stories. Thus his Sebastopol Tales fiercely criticize war and ennoble an common soldier. When Childhood, Adolescence, and the war stories appeared, everyone hai take them as the first full and complete artistic manner of the psychological process.1One the greatest novels by Tolstoy is state of war and Peace. While the scope of War and Peace is epic, Tolstoy does non load the novel down with historic facts and dates. Instead, he brings hi explanation alive by making it personal. A reviewer watches the loose destinies of the Rostovs, the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys unfold with a level of emotion and attachment that no historical account could convey. And their fates are projected on to the destiny of a nation. It is this correctly historical fiction with a purpose that won Tolstoy his well-deserved international acknowledgement. War and Peac e is universal in its appeal because of the universality of its themes that war is profoundly alien to human nature that the average soldiers patriotism is the building ingurgitate of nations (e.g. the reference work of captain Tushin) the limited impact that even great individuals leave on hi write up (Napoleon and Kutuzov).Tolstoy draws his display cases with simple brush strokes, with psychological depth, that makes them real. For example, the character of Natasha Rostova, whose knockout and attractiveness depended not so much on her appearance, as on her youth and her inner energy, the beauty of her soul reports to us the symbolic signification she has in the novel. Unlike all the other main characters whose names are known to the reader before their physical appearance is described, Natasha is left nameless. She appears not like a true human being but rather as a mythical creature that personifies the joy of life This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life . . . ran to hide her flushed front in the lace of her mothers mantillanot salaried the least attention to her severe remarkand began to laugh. She laughed, and in fragmentary sentences try to explain about a doll which she produced from the folds of her frock. 2In Anna Karenina, probably his stylistically close perfect novel, he sought to create a novel in the tradition of the Greek unequivocals. He dwells on marital happiness, the fate of an mistreat woman in society and the role of physical and spiritual kip down in marriage. In Anna Karenina the epic horizons are narrower than in War and Peace, that the feelings of the characters are more(prenominal) sharp and acute, their sufferings at times even more profound. Annas and Vronskys story of forbidden love strikes readers because Tolstoy shows the fatal inevitability of a correlative attraction, its development and then its fading and its tragic denouement. Anna and Vronsky are depicted as being destroyed by some external force, in fact, by each other.Tolstoy writes that they involuntarily submit to the other Involuntarily submitting to the powerlessness of Anna who had devoted herself up to him entirely, and pulld her fate in his hands, ready to accept anythinghe had long ceased to think that they might part, as he had thought then. He had completely abandoned himself to his passion, and that passion was binding him more and more about to her.3The brilliance of Tolstoys art is his al about casual description of details that, at first sight seems insignificant and accidental, but which afterwards come to match a crucial role in a characters fate. In the end, the playing period of Annas love is lay outed with such strength that it cannot leave any reader indifferent.After he had written Anna Karenina, Tolstoy got determined against literature. He wanted henceforth to be a example philosopher rather than an artist. And as Anthony Daniels notes in his article, many peck subsequently fell under Tolstoys didactic teaching, even for a time Chekhov.4 This didactics became peculiar to his successive works. In Tolstoys literature we find the observation of what are the proper ways of living. For instance in his short story How Much Land Does A serviceman remove? the main character is an ordinary farmer whose own greed destroys him. In this literary work, the condition exploits Pahoms search as a symbolic warning that longing for too much can result in loss of everything.Tolstoy strengthens his moral believes by his stories. Through the symbolism he endeavors to preach his philosophy and deliver unknown messages to readers. Thus, main characters running against the sun conveys the symbolic nitty-gritty that Pahom is moving against time and course of life. This symbolic device produces the atmosphere of precipitation and panic. However, at the end of the story the main character dies and all his followers for unreal aim turns out to be worthless. The morality of the story is that we moldiness properly estimate our abilities and what is more important our needs. Tolstoy finishes this story with the conclusion that in conclusion we all will need not more that only elflike piece of land His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahm to he in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.5In the mid-1880s Tolstoy continues writing short stories. He tends to use fairy tales or religious legends to develop their ideas in his own works. The style of these short stories is plain but expressive. They often reveal Tolstoys religious convictions. In 1886, Tolstoy publishes the novella The finis of Ivan Illych. The story concerns expiry man who becomes aware that his life is nearly over. By the time Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Illych, he got engaged in extremely puritanical ideas. His protagonists main entertainment in life is playing bridge with his friends, which is condemned by the wr iter as vicious because, like music at the conservatoire, it is frivolous, artificial, and inauthentic. He severely criticizes this character and depicts his life as a shallow, terrible being Ivan Illychs life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.6 Ivan is a conforming opinions and expectations of people of socially higher rank usually determine Ivans behavior and wishes.He tries to keep up friendship with only those who have corking social position. That is why his life is terrible there is no place for free will, for well-grounded decision. And the only exemplary character in this story is a peasant Gerasim. Tolstoy wrote about the peasants as about the moral agents, bearers of moral virtues. In The Death of Ivan Illych Ivan learned something from Gerasim, who made him see a incident to which Ivans way of living had kept his eyes shut, a possibility that was excluded by the way he lived. Ivan Illych had been caught up in a way of life that excluded the possibility of care for and devotion to other people. By his example Gerasim unresolved up for Ivan what was a new possibility and made him realize what was reproach with his life. In this story Tolstoy juxtaposes moral peasant with a morally weak nobleman.Though in his late works Tolstoy exhibited too ideological approach when evolving his characters and presenting themes that led to simplifications, his penetrating psychological analysis had great influence on later literature. The most important thing is that Tolstoy succeeded in his major endeavor as a writer to use his linguistic and artistic means to portray eternal human passions through typical traits of his epoch, going beyond linguistic, social and other borders. Tolstoy solved this task excellently. And this is why he is a classic of both Russian and world literature.Works Cited ListDaniels, Anthony. Chekhov & Tolstoy. New Criterion. Vol. 23 8, April 2005.Orwin Tussing, Donna. Tolstoys Art and Thought, 1847-1880. P rinceton University Press, 1993Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Aylmer Maude Transl., Louise Maude Transl., London Penguin, 1978.-, How Much Land Does a Man Need? Twenty-three Tales, Transl. L. and A. Maude, New York Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1907 113-122-, The Death of Ivan Illych Aylmer Maude Transl., Louise Maude Transl., Retrieved on December 3, 2005 from Tolstoy program libraryhttp//home.aol.com/Tolstoy28-, War and Peace. Henry Gifford editor, Aylmer Maude Transl., Louise Maude Transl., Oxford Oxford University Press, 1998.1Donna Tussing Orwin. Tolstoys Art and Thought, 1847-1880. Princeton University Press, 1993 192 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, 39 3 Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina, 381 4 Anthony Daniels, Chekhov & Tolstoy, 31 5 Tolstoy Leo, Twenty-three Tales, How Much Land Does A Man Need?, 122 6 Tolstoy Leo, The Death of Ivan Illych, Chapter II