Leo Tolstoy - Count Lev Nikolayevich

Leo Tolstoy's life was a battleground - a series of wars between privilege and principle, indulgence and asceticism, cavalier martiality and indignant pacifism, self-hate and self-knowledge. He had an almost idyllic childhood and adolescence, his student life was one of potential brilliance and actual excess, he enjoyed international acclaim as a writer, and he fathered 13 children - and yet in all of this he seems to have been unable to take any joy. As a noble he felt he had failed to improve the feudal system he was born into; as a man, rather than looking back on his youth with mild regret, he was tortured with remorse for his dissipation; the later years of his marriage were filled with jealousy and bitterness; and at the end of his life his decision to follow the principles in which he believed led to his being effectively disowned by his family. As a writer, he moved from keeping journals to writing autobiographical novels and then to the epic and insightfully psychological; but, as his views shifted, he turned increasingly towards moral philosophy and mysticism. He was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church for his heretical religious views, and the imperial powers censored those of his works that were published in Russia because his politics were considered heretical, too. By the end of his life, he was seen more as a prophet than a writer. He was born in 1828 on the estate at Yasnaya Polyana, about 120 miles south of Moscow, into a family of considerable standing. His very early life was tranquil and happy, but the death of his parents meant that he was brought up in various places by various relatives. He was a gifted linguist and omnivorous reader, but was unhappy at the education offered at Kazan University (the feeling was mutual; his tutors thought him ‘unable and unwilling to learn') and left in 1847 before graduating. Over the next 14 years Tolstoy lived the life of a dissolute young nobleman, joined the Army, ran up huge gambling debts, fought duels, fathered a son to a serf and much more besides - before undergoing a slow transformation into a man of deep thought, brilliant literary insight and radical action. --Naxos Audiobooks

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