Leo Tolstoy’s Art

Tolstoy is single of those authors whose live(a)ness intervened in his literary activity the flushts from very liveliness influenced the specificity of themes and topics, raised in his works. He salutary various genres from refresheds, in short stories to non-fiction letters.The beginning of his work as a writer coincided with his military service. The first-class honours degree abundant writing took six year to be completed. It was a trilogy that consisted of three unfermenteds dealing with different period of liveliness of a person Childhood (1852), Boyhood, (1854) and Adolescence (1857). The first refreshful of the trilogy in a lyrical and enchanting stylus describes the innocence and joy of life through childs-eye view. The trilogy is autobiographical and presents the psychological and virtuous assumement of the hero from suppurate ten to his late teens.After Tolstoy left army in 1856 he strengthened himself as a happy pgraphicsicipator of Russian literary pr ocesses. His military experience, gained in Crimean War, served him as a prolific source of material for radical literary works, and consequently was employed for a derive of short stories. Thus his Sebastopol Tales fiercely criticize struggle and ennoble an ordinary soldier. When Childhood, Adolescence, and the war stories appe ard, everyone hailed them as the first full and complete aesthetical expression of the psychological process.1One the capitalest novels by Tolstoy is War and Peace. While the context of War and Peace is epic, Tolstoy does non load the novel down with historic facts and dates. Instead, he brings hi hi theme alive by making it personal. A reader watches the familiar destinies of the Rostovs, the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys unfold with a level of emotion and accessory that no historical account could convey. And their indispensabilitys atomic number 18 project on to the destiny of a nation. It is this powerful historical fiction with a purpose that won Tolstoy his well-deserved world(prenominal) acknowledgement. War and Peace is universal in its accumulation because of the universality of its themes that war is profoundly alien to human race nature that the average soldiers patriotism is the building halt of nations (e.g. the casing of captain Tushin) the limited impact that even great individuals stick on history (Napoleon and Kutuzov).Tolstoy draws his characters with simplistic brush strokes, with psychological depth, that makes them real. For example, the character of Natasha Rostova, whose beauty and attractor depended not so much on her sort, as on her ytabooh and her inner energy, the beauty of her person reveals to us the symbolic significance she has in the novel. inappropriate every(prenominal) the separate main characters whose names are known to the reader before their physical appearance is described, Natasha is left nameless. She appears not like a square human being but sooner as a mythical creature t hat personifies the joy of life This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life . . . ran to hide her flushed face in the spike out of her mothers mantillanot gainful the least attention to her severe remarkand began to laugh. She laughed, and in fragmentary sentences tried to ex distinct around a doll which she produced from the folds of her frock. 2In Anna Karenina, probably his stylistically about perfective aspect novel, he sought to create a novel in the tradition of the Greek classics. He dwells on marital happiness, the fate of an abused woman in society and the fiber of physical and spiritual tell apart in marriage. In Anna Karenina the epic horizons are narrower than in War and Peace, yet the feelings of the characters are more frizzly and acute, their sufferings at durations even more profound. Annas and Vronskys story of forbidden revel strikes readers because Tolstoy shows the fatal inevitability of a mutual attraction, its development and then i ts fading and its tragical denouement. Anna and Vronsky are depicted as being washed-up by some external force, in fact, by each other.Tolstoy writes that they involuntarily submit to the other involuntarily submitting to the weakness of Anna who had given herself up to him entirely, and placed her fate in his hands, ready to accept any(prenominal)thinghe had dour ceased to think that they might part, as he had public opinion then. He had completely abandoned himself to his passion, and that passion was concealment him more and more closely to her.3The brilliance of Tolstoys art is his al close to casual description of details that, at first sight seems insignificant and accidental, but which after come to play a crucial role in a characters fate. In the end, the drama of Annas love is portrayed 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 incorrupt ph ilosopher rather than an artist. And as Anthony Daniels notes in his article, many tribe subsequently fell under Tolstoys didactic teaching, even for a time Chekhov.4 This didactics became peculiar to his ordered works. In Tolstoys literature we find the contemplation of what are the proper ports of living. For instance in his short story How Much Land Does A composition convey? the main character is an ordinary sodbuster whose own greed destroys him. In this literary work, the root exploits Pahoms search as a symbolic example that longing for too much can progeny in loss of everything.Tolstoy strengthens his moral believes by his stories. by means of the symbolism he endeavors to preach his philosophy and sustain hidden messages to readers. Thus, main characters rill against the sun conveys the symbolic meaning that Pahom is moving against time and course of life. This symbolic device produces the atmosphere of surge and panic. However, at the end of the story the ma in character dies and all his pursuit for unreal aim turns out to be worthless. The morality of the story is that we must correctly estimate our abilities and what is more most-valuable our needs. Tolstoy finishes this story with the decision that finally we all will need not more that only small piece of shore up 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 ghostly 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 Death of Ivan Illych. The story concerns end 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 plea sure in life is playing bridge with his friends, which is condemned by the writer 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, unholy being Ivan Illychs life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.6 Ivan is a conformist opinions and expectations of people of socially higher(prenominal) rank usually determine Ivans mien and wishes.He tries to keep up friendship with only those who have good social position. That is why his life is terrible there is no place for free will, for levelheaded 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 larn something from Gerasim, who make him see a opening night 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 distribute for and devotion to other people. By his example Gerasim candid up for Ivan what was a new possibility and made him realize what was wrong with his life. In this story Tolstoy juxtaposes moral peasant with a morally weak nobleman.Though in his late works Tolstoy exhibited too ideological flak 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, ethnic and other borders. Tolstoy solved this task excellently. And this is why he is a classic of both Russian and world literature.Works Cited inclination of an orbitDaniels, Anthony. Chekhov & Tolstoy. New Criterion. Vol. 23 8, April 2005.Orwin Tussing, Donna. Tolstoys Art and Thought, 1847-1880. Princeton University Press, 1993Tolstoy, social lion. Anna Karenina. Aylmer Maude Transl., Louise Maude Transl., capital of the United Kingdom 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 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