Leo Tolstoy childhood biography. Short biography of Leo Tolstoy: the most important events

Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 in the Tula province (Russia) into a family belonging to the noble class. In the 1860s, he wrote his first major novel, War and Peace. In 1873, Tolstoy began work on the second of his most famous books, Anna Karenina.

He continued to write fiction throughout the 1880s and 1890s. One of his most successful later works is The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy died on November 20, 1910 in Astapovo, Russia.

The first years of life

On September 9, 1828, the future writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana (Tula province, Russia). He was the fourth child in a large noble family. In 1830, when Tolstoy's mother, née Princess Volkonskaya, died, his father's cousin took over the care of the children. Their father, Count Nikolai Tolstoy, died seven years later, and their aunt was appointed guardian. After the death of aunt Leo Tolstoy, his brothers and sisters moved to their second aunt in Kazan. Although Tolstoy experienced many losses at an early age, he later idealized his childhood memories in his work.

It is important to note that primary education in the biography of Tolstoy was received at home, he was given lessons by French and German teachers. In 1843 he entered the Faculty of Oriental Languages ​​at the Imperial Kazan University. Tolstoy did not succeed in his studies - low grades forced him to move to an easier law faculty. Further difficulties in his studies led Tolstoy to eventually leave the Imperial Kazan University in 1847 without a degree. He returned to his parents' estate, where he was going to start farming. However, his undertaking ended in failure - he was too often absent, leaving for Tula and Moscow. What he really excelled at was keeping his own diary - it was this lifelong habit that inspired Leo Tolstoy for most of his works.

Tolstoy was fond of music, his favorite composers were Schumann, Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Mendelssohn. Lev Nikolaevich could play their works for several hours a day.

Once, the elder brother of Tolstoy, Nikolai, during his army leave, came to visit Lev, and persuaded his brother to join the army as a cadet to the south, to the Caucasus mountains, where he served. After serving as a cadet, Leo Tolstoy was transferred to Sevastopol in November 1854, where he fought in the Crimean War until August 1855.

Early publications

During his years as a cadet in the army, Tolstoy had a lot of free time. During quiet periods, he worked on an autobiographical story called Childhood. In it, he wrote about his favorite childhood memories. In 1852, Tolstoy submitted the story to Sovremennik, the most popular magazine of the time. The story was happily accepted, and it became Tolstoy's first publication. Since that time, critics have put him on a par with already famous writers, among whom were Ivan Turgenev (with whom Tolstoy made friends), Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky and others.

After completing the story "Childhood", Tolstoy began to write about his daily life in the army outpost in the Caucasus. Started in the army years, the work "Cossacks", he finished only in 1862, after he had already left the army.

Surprisingly, Tolstoy managed to continue writing during the active battles in the Crimean War. During this time he wrote Boyhood (1854), a sequel to Childhood, the second book in Tolstoy's autobiographical trilogy. At the height of the Crimean War, Tolstoy expressed his views on the striking contradictions of the war through the trilogy of Sevastopol Tales. In the second book of Sevastopol Tales, Tolstoy experimented with a relatively new technique: part of the story is presented as a narrative from the person of a soldier.

After the end of the Crimean War, Tolstoy left the army and returned to Russia. Arriving home, the author was very popular on the literary scene of St. Petersburg.

Stubborn and arrogant, Tolstoy refused to belong to any particular school of thought. Declaring himself an anarchist, he left for Paris in 1857. Once there, he lost all his money and was forced to return home to Russia. He also managed to publish Youth, the third part of an autobiographical trilogy, in 1857.

Returning to Russia in 1862, Tolstoy published the first of 12 issues of the thematic magazine Yasnaya Polyana. In the same year he married the daughter of a doctor named Sofya Andreevna Bers.

Major novels

Living in Yasnaya Polyana with his wife and children, Tolstoy spent most of the 1860s working on his first famous novel, War and Peace. Part of the novel was first published in the Russian Bulletin in 1865 under the title "Year 1805". By 1868, he had released three more chapters. A year later, the novel was completely finished. Both critics and the public have argued about the historical justice of the Napoleonic Wars in the novel, combined with the development of the stories of its thoughtful and realistic yet fictional characters. The novel is also unique in that it includes three long satirical essays on the laws of history. Among the ideas that Tolstoy also tries to convey in this novel is the conviction that a person's position in society and the meaning of human life are mainly derivatives of his daily activities.

After the success of War and Peace in 1873, Tolstoy began work on his second most famous book, Anna Karenina. It was based in part on real events during the Russian-Turkish war. Like War and Peace, this book describes some biographical events from the life of Tolstoy himself, this is especially noticeable in the romantic relationship between the characters of Kitty and Levin, which is said to be reminiscent of Tolstoy's courtship of his own wife.

The first lines of the book "Anna Karenina" are among the most famous: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina was published in parts from 1873 to 1877, and was highly acclaimed by the public. The royalties received for the novel rapidly enriched the writer.

Conversion

Despite the success of Anna Karenina, after the completion of the novel, Tolstoy experienced a spiritual crisis and was depressed. The next stage in the biography of Leo Tolstoy is characterized by the search for the meaning of life. The writer first turned to the Russian Orthodox Church, but did not find answers to his questions there. He concluded that Christian churches were corrupt and, instead of an organized religion, promoted their own beliefs. He decided to express these beliefs by founding a new publication in 1883 called The Mediator.
As a result, for his non-standard and conflicting spiritual beliefs, Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. He was even watched by the secret police. When Tolstoy, led by his new conviction, wanted to give away all his money and give up everything that was superfluous, his wife was categorically against it. Not wanting to escalate the situation, Tolstoy reluctantly agreed to a compromise: he transferred the copyright to his wife and, apparently, all deductions for his work until 1881.

Late fiction

In addition to his religious treatises, Tolstoy continued to write fiction throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Among the genres of his later works were moral stories and realistic fiction. One of the most successful among his later works was the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", written in 1886. The main character is struggling to fight the death looming over him. In short, Ivan Ilyich is horrified by the realization that he wasted his life on trifles, but this realization comes to him too late.

In 1898, Tolstoy wrote Father Sergius, a work of fiction in which he criticizes the beliefs he developed after his spiritual transformation. The following year, he wrote his third voluminous novel, Resurrection. The work received good reviews, but this success hardly matched the level of recognition of his previous novels. Other later works of Tolstoy are essays on art, a satirical play called The Living Corpse, written in 1890, and a story called Hadji Murad (1904), which was discovered and published after his death. In 1903, Tolstoy wrote a short story "After the Ball", which was first published after his death, in 1911.

Old age

During his later years, Tolstoy reaped the benefits of international recognition. However, he was still struggling to reconcile his spiritual beliefs with the tensions he created in his married life. His wife not only did not agree with his teaching, she did not approve of his students, who regularly visited Tolstoy in the family estate. Eager to avoid the growing discontent of his wife, in October 1910, Tolstoy and his youngest daughter Alexandra embarked on a pilgrimage. Alexandra was the doctor for her elderly father during the trip. Trying not to flaunt their privacy, they traveled incognito, hoping to evade unnecessary inquiries, but sometimes to no avail.

Death and legacy

Unfortunately, the pilgrimage proved too burdensome for the aging writer. In November 1910, the head of the small railway station Astapovo opened the doors of his house for Tolstoy so that the sick writer could rest. Shortly thereafter, on November 20, 1910, Tolstoy died. He was buried in his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy lost so many people close to him.

To this day, Tolstoy's novels are considered among the finest achievements of literary art. War and Peace is often cited as the greatest novel ever written. In the modern scientific community, Tolstoy is widely recognized as the owner of the gift of describing the unconscious motives of character, the refinement of which he defended, emphasizing the role of everyday actions in determining the character and goals of people.

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Lev Tolstoy- the most famous Russian writer, famous all over the world for his works.

short biography

Born in 1828 in the Tula province into a noble family. He spent his childhood in the Yasnaya Polyana estate, where he received his primary education at home. He had three brothers and a sister. He was brought up by his guardians, so in early childhood, at the birth of his sister, his mother died, and later, in 1840, his father, which is why the whole family moved to relatives in Kazan. There he studied at Kazan University in two faculties, but decided to quit his studies and return to his native places.

Tolstoy spent two years in the army in the Caucasus. He bravely participated in several battles and was even awarded an order for the defense of Sevastopol. He could have had a good military career, but he wrote several songs ridiculing the military command, as a result of which he had to leave the army.

At the end of the 50s, Lev Nikolayevich went to travel across Europe and returned to Russia after the abolition of serfdom. Even during his travels, he was disappointed with the European way of life, as he saw a very large contrast between the rich and the poor. That is why, returning to Russia, he was glad that the peasants were now uplifted.

He got married, 13 children were born in marriage, 5 of whom died in childhood. His wife, Sophia, helped her husband by copying all her husband's creations in neat handwriting.

He opened several schools, in which he furnished everything as he wanted. He himself made up the school curriculum - or rather, the absence of such. Discipline did not play a key role for him, he wanted the children to strive for knowledge themselves, so the main task of the teacher was to interest the students so that they would want to learn.

He was excommunicated for the fact that Tolstoy put forward his theories about what the church should be. Just a month before his death, he decided to secretly leave his native estate. As a result of the trip, he became very ill and died on November 7, 1910. The writer was buried in Yasnaya Polyana near the ravine, where he loved to play with his brothers as a child.

Literary contributions

Lev Nikolayevich began to write while studying at the University - mostly it was homework compared to various literary works. It is believed that it was because of literature that he dropped out of school - he wanted to devote all his free time to reading.

In the army, he worked on his "Sevastopol Stories", and also, as already mentioned, composed songs for his colleagues. Upon his return from the army, he took part in a literary circle in St. Petersburg, from where he went to Europe. He noticed the peculiarities of people well and tried to reflect this in his works.

Tolstoy wrote many different works, but gained worldwide fame thanks to two novels - "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", in which he accurately reflected the life of people of those times.

The contribution of this great writer to world culture is enormous - it was thanks to him that many people learned about Russia. His works are published to this day, they are used for performances and films.

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(09.09.1828 - 20.11.1910).

Born in the Yasnaya Polyana estate. Among the ancestors of the writer on the paternal side is an associate of Peter I - P.A.Tolstoy, who was one of the first in Russia to receive the title of count. A participant in the Patriotic War of 1812 was the father of the writer gr. N.I. Tolstoy. On the maternal side, Tolstoy belonged to the family of the Bolkonsky princes, related by kinship with the Trubetskoy, Golitsyn, Odoevsky, Lykov and other noble families. On his mother's side, Tolstoy was a relative of A.S. Pushkin.

When Tolstoy was nine years old, his father took him to Moscow for the first time, the impressions of his meeting with which were vividly conveyed by the future writer in the children's essay "The Kremlin". Moscow is here called "the greatest and most populous city in Europe", the walls of which "saw the shame and defeat of the invincible Napoleonic regiments." The first period of the Moscow life of young Tolstoy lasted less than four years. He was orphaned early, losing first his mother and then his father. With his sister and three brothers, young Tolstoy moved to Kazan. Here lived one of my father's sisters, who became their guardian.

Living in Kazan, Tolstoy spent two and a half years preparing to enter the university, where he studied from 1844, first at the oriental, and then at the law faculty. He studied Turkish and Tatar languages ​​with the famous Turkologist Professor Kazembek. In his mature period, the writer was fluent in English, French and German; read in Italian, Polish, Czech and Serbian; knew Greek, Latin, Ukrainian, Tatar, Church Slavonic; studied Hebrew, Turkish, Dutch, Bulgarian and other languages.

Classes in government programs and textbooks burdened Tolstoy the student. He was carried away by independent work on a historical theme and, leaving the university, left Kazan for Yasnaya Polyana, which he received through the division of his father's inheritance. Then he went to Moscow, where at the end of 1850 he began his writing career: an unfinished story from a gypsy life (the manuscript has not survived) and a description of one day he lived ("The Story of Yesterday"). At the same time, the story "Childhood" was started. Soon, Tolstoy decided to go to the Caucasus, where his older brother, Nikolai Nikolaevich, an artillery officer, served in the army. Having entered the army as a cadet, he later passed the exam for a junior officer's rank. The writer's impressions of the Caucasian War were reflected in the stories "Raid" (1853), "Cutting the Forest" (1855), "Demoted" (1856), in the story "Cossacks" (1852-1863). In the Caucasus, the story "Childhood" was completed, in 1852 published in the journal "Sovremennik".

When the Crimean War began, Tolstoy transferred from the Caucasus to the Danube Army, which was operating against the Turks, and then to Sevastopol, besieged by the combined forces of England, France and Turkey. Commanding a battery on the 4th bastion, Tolstoy was awarded the Order of Anna and medals "For the Defense of Sevastopol" and "In Memory of the War of 1853-1856." More than once Tolstoy was presented for the award with the military Cross of St. George, but he never received the "George". In the army, Tolstoy wrote a number of projects - on the reorganization of artillery batteries and the creation of rifled battalions, on the reorganization of the entire Russian army. Together with a group of officers of the Crimean army, Tolstoy intended to publish the journal Soldiersky Vestnik (Military Leaflet), but its publication was not authorized by Emperor Nicholas I.

In the fall of 1856 he retired and soon went on a six-month trip abroad, visiting France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. In 1859, Tolstoy opened a school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana, and then helped open more than 20 schools in the surrounding villages. To direct their activities along the right, from his point of view, path, he published the pedagogical journal "Yasnaya Polyana" (1862). In order to study the organization of school affairs in foreign countries, the writer went abroad for the second time in 1860.

After the manifesto of 1861, Tolstoy became one of the first call world mediators who sought to help the peasants resolve their disputes with the landowners about land. Soon in Yasnaya Polyana, when Tolstoy was away, the gendarmes searched in search of a secret printing house, which the writer allegedly started after communicating with A.I. Herzen in London. Tolstoy had to close the school and stop publishing a pedagogical journal. In total, he penned eleven articles on school and pedagogy ("On public education", "Upbringing and education", "On social activities in the field of public education" and others). In them, he described in detail the experience of his work with students ("Yasnaya Polyanskaya school for the months of November and December", "On the methods of teaching literacy", "Who should learn to write from, our peasant children or we peasant children"). Tolstoy the teacher demanded that the school should be closer to life, he strove to put it at the service of the needs of the people, and for this to intensify the processes of education and upbringing, to develop the creative abilities of children.

At the same time, already at the beginning of his career, Tolstoy becomes a supervised writer. One of the first works of the writer were the stories "Childhood", "Adolescence" and "Youth", "Youth" (which, however, was not written). According to the author's idea, they were to compose the novel "Four Epochs of Development".

In the early 1860s. the order of life of Tolstoy, his way of life, is established for decades. In 1862 he married the daughter of a Moscow doctor, Sofya Andreevna Bers.

The writer is working on the novel War and Peace (1863-1869). After completing War and Peace, Tolstoy studied materials about Peter I and his time for several years. However, having written several chapters of the "Peter's" novel, Tolstoy abandoned his idea. In the early 1870s. the writer was again carried away by pedagogy. He put a lot of work into the creation of "ABC", and then "New ABC". At the same time he compiled "Books for Reading", where he included many of his stories.

In the spring of 1873, Tolstoy began and four years later finished work on a large novel about modernity, naming it after the main character - Anna Karenina.

The spiritual crisis experienced by Tolstoy at the end of 1870 - early. 1880, ended with a turning point in his worldview. In Confessions (1879-1882), the writer speaks of a revolution in his views, the meaning of which he saw in a break with the ideology of the noble class and going over to the side of the “common working people”.

At the beginning of 1880. Tolstoy moved with his family from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow, taking care of educating his growing children. In 1882, a census of the Moscow population took place, in which the writer took part. He saw the inhabitants of the city slums up close and described their terrible life in an article on the census and in the treatise "So What Should We Do?" (1882-1886). In them the writer made the main conclusion: "... You can't live like that, you can't live like that, you can't!" "Confession" and "So what should we do?" represented works in which Tolstoy acted simultaneously as an artist and as a publicist, as a deep psychologist and a daring sociologist-analyst. Later, this kind of works - according to the genre of journalistic, but including artistic scenes and paintings saturated with elements of imagery - will take a large place in his work.

In these and subsequent years, Tolstoy also wrote religious and philosophical works: "Criticism of dogmatic theology", "What is my faith?" In them, the writer not only showed a change in his religious and moral views, but also subjected to a critical revision the main dogmas and principles of the teaching of the official church. In the middle of 1880. Tolstoy and his associates founded the Posrednik publishing house in Moscow, which printed books and pictures for the people. The first of Tolstoy's works, printed for the "common" people, was the story "How People Live". In it, as in many other works of this cycle, the writer made extensive use of not only folklore subjects, but also expressive means of oral creativity. Tolstoy's folk stories are thematically and stylistically related to his plays for folk theaters and, most of all, the drama Power of Darkness (1886), which captures the tragedy of the post-reform village, where age-old patriarchal orders were crumbling under the rule of money.

In the 1880s. Tolstoy's novels The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Kholstomer (The History of the Horse) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1887-1889) appeared. In it, as well as in the story "The Devil" (1889-1890) and the story "Father Sergius" (1890-1898), the problems of love and marriage, the purity of family relations are posed.

On the basis of social and psychological contrast, Tolstoy's story "The Boss and the Worker" (1895) is built, stylistically connected with the cycle of his folk stories written in the 80s. Five years earlier, Tolstoy had written the comedy Fruits of Enlightenment for the "home play". It also shows "owners" and "workers": noble landowners living in the city and peasants who came from a hungry village, deprived of land. The images of the first are given satirically, the second is depicted by the author as intelligent and positive people, but in some scenes they are also "presented" in an ironic light.

All these works of the writer are united by the thought of the inevitable and close in time "denouement" of social contradictions, about replacing the obsolete social "order". “What the denouement will be, I don’t know,” wrote Tolstoy in 1892, “but that the matter is approaching it and that life cannot continue in such forms, I am sure.” This idea inspired the largest work of the entire work of the "late" Tolstoy - the novel "Resurrection" (1889-1899).

Less than ten years separate Anna Karenina from War and Peace. "Resurrection" is separated from "Anna Karenina" by two decades. And although much distinguishes the third novel from the two previous ones, they are united by a truly epic scale in the depiction of life, the ability to "match" individual human destinies with the fate of the people in the narrative. Tolstoy himself pointed to the unity that exists between his novels: he said that "Resurrection" was written in the "old manner," meaning, first of all, the epic "manner" in which War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written ". "Resurrection" was the last novel in the writer's work.

At the beginning of 1900. The Holy Synod Tolstoy excommunicated him from the Orthodox Church.

In the last decade of his life, the writer worked on the novella "Hadji Murad" (1896-1904), in which he sought to compare the "two poles of imperious absolutism" - the European, personified by Nicholas I, and the Asian, personified by Shamil. At the same time, Tolstoy created one of his best plays, The Living Corpse. Her hero - a kind-hearted, gentle, conscientious Fyodor Protasov leaves the family, breaks off relations with his familiar environment, falls to the "bottom" and in the courthouse, unable to bear the lies, pretense, and pharisaism of "respectable" people, with a pistol shot at himself suicide. The article "I Can't Be Silent", written in 1908, in which he protested against the repression of the participants in the events of 1905–1907, sounded sharp. The stories of the writer "After the ball", "For what?" Belong to the same period.

Weighed down by the way of life in Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy more than once intended and did not dare to leave her for a long time. But he could no longer live on the principle of "together-apart" and on the night of October 28 (November 10) secretly left Yasnaya Polyana. On the way, he fell ill with pneumonia and had to stop at the small station Astapovo (now Lev Tolstoy), where he died. On November 10 (23), 1910, the writer was buried in Yasnaya Polyana, in the forest, on the edge of a ravine, where in childhood he and his brother were looking for a "green stick" that kept the "secret" of how to make all people happy.

In August 1828, a talented writer and, moreover, a philosopher, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born. His parents died early, and almost from birth he was raised by a guardian from Kazan.

At the age of sixteen, Lev Nikolaevich entered the Faculty of Philology of Kazan University, later he transferred to the Faculty of Law. But still, he did not study for a long time and left the university altogether. He began to look for himself, living in Yasnaya Polyana, which he inherited from his father. A little later he took part in the Caucasian war against the Chechens. During these years, Lev Nikolaevich began to write his autobiographical trilogy "Childhood" (1852) and "Boyhood" (1852-1854). And it was this period of his life that was reflected in a large number of Tolstoy's works, for example, the story "Raid" (1853), "Cutting the Forest" (1855), the story "Cossacks" (1852-1863), in which a young nobleman wants to live an ordinary life , next to nature.

After the start of the Crimean War, at the request of Lev Nikolaevich, he was transferred to Sevastopol. There he wrote many works, which soon greatly impressed his readers. Tolstoy received many awards for bravery and for the defense of Sevastopol. In the same years, namely 1855-1857, Lev Nikolaevich wrote the last part of the "Youth" trilogy.

In 1855, Lev Nikolaevich returned to St. Petersburg and retired, due to the fact that he did not like to fight. He meets a lot of writers. During this period, he travels a lot in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. He opens schools for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana and in the surrounding area. Travels a lot because of this event. In the year of the abolition of serfdom, he begins to actively defend the peasants from the landowners who wanted to take away the land from the liberated. Because of this, many complaints were received that demanded the dismissal of Tolstoy. They searched his house, followed him, tried to find dirt on Tolstoy, but soon his life became very quiet.

In 1862, Lev Nikolaevich married Sofya Andreevna Bers. After a while, his family was very large, Tolstoy had nine children. He writes two of his most popular works: in 1863-1869 "War and Peace", and in 1873-1877 "Anna Karenina", a story about a woman who was subjected to criminal passion.

A little later, he and his family moved temporarily to Moscow to educate their children, but this trip gave Tolstoy a little more than the education of children. It was in Moscow that Lev Nikolaevich changed his attitude to work. He saw how ordinary hard workers are fighting for a piece of bread, and decided to be like them. Tolstoy renounces the authorship of all his written works and begins to make a living with his hands. But soon the need for money forced Tolstoy to return his authorship. Over the years, he writes again. In the interval between 1879 and 1882. writes the work "Confession", in 1884, "What is my faith?", and from 1884 to 1886 "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." In 1886 the drama "The Power of Darkness" was published, and until 1890 the play "The Fruits of Enlightenment" was written. Also during this period, namely from 1887 to 1889, Lev Nikolaevich created the story "The Kreutzer Sonata", and immediately proceeded to the novel "Resurrection", which he finished in 1899. In 1890, Tolstoy wrote the work "Father Sergius".

In the early 1900s, he wrote a series of articles exposing the entire system of government. The government of Nicholas II issued a decree according to which the Holy Synod (the highest church institution in Russia) excommunicated Tolstoy from the church, which caused a wave of indignation in society.

The last decade of Tolstoy presented readers with such works as the story "Hadji Murad" (1896-1904), the drama "The Living Corpse" (1900), the story "After the Ball" (1909, but published in 1911).

Before his death, Lev Nikolaevich lived for a long time in the Crimea. He was very ill and began to draw up a will, which caused quarrels in his family over the division of the inheritance.

In 1910, Tolstoy secretly leaves Yasnaya Polyana and catches a cold on the way, and while on the road, namely at the Astapov station of the Ryazan-Ural railway, Lev Nikolayevich dies on November 20.

Born into the noble family of Maria Nikolaevna, nee Princess Volkonskaya, and Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy in the Yasnaya Polyana estate in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province as the fourth child. The happy marriage of his parents became the prototype of the heroes in the novel "War and Peace" - Princess Marya and Nikolai Rostov. Parents died early. Tatiana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya, a distant relative, was engaged in the upbringing of the future writer, tutors - the German Reselman and the French Saint-Thomas, who became the heroes of the writer's stories and novels - were educated. At the age of 13, the future writer and his family moved to the hospitable home of P.I. Yushkova in Kazan.

In 1844, Lev Tolstoy entered the Imperial Kazan University at the Department of Oriental Literature of the Philosophical Faculty. After the first year, he did not pass the transition exam and transferred to the Faculty of Law, where he studied for two years, plunging into secular entertainment. Leo Tolstoy, naturally shy and ugly, acquired a reputation in secular society as a "thinker" about the happiness of death, eternity, love, although he himself wanted to shine. And in 1847 he left the university and went to Yasnaya Polyana with the intention to study science and "achieve the highest degree of perfection in music and painting."

In 1849, the first school for peasant children was opened on his estate, where Foka Demidovich, his serf, a former musician, taught. Yermil Bazykin, who studied there, said: “There were 20 of us boys, the teacher was Foka Demidovich, a courtyard. Under father L.N. Tolstoy, he served as a musician. The old man was good. He taught us the alphabet, counting, sacred history. Lev Nikolaevich also came to us, he also studied with us, showed us his letter. I went every other day, after two, or even every day. He always ordered the teacher not to offend us ... ”.

In 1851, under the influence of his older brother Nikolai, Lev left for the Caucasus, having already begun writing Childhood, and in the fall he became a cadet in the 4th battery of the 20th artillery brigade stationed in the Cossack village of Starogladovskaya on the Terek River. There he finished the first part of Childhood and sent it to the Sovremennik magazine to its editor N.A. Nekrasov. On September 18, 1852, the manuscript was printed with great success.

Leo Tolstoy served for three years in the Caucasus and, having the right to the most honorable St. George Cross for bravery, “conceded” to his fellow soldier, as giving him a life pension. At the beginning of the Crimean War of 1853-1856. transferred to the Danube army, participated in the battles at Oltenitsa, the siege of Silistria, the defense of Sevastopol. Then the written story "Sevastopol in December 1854" was read by Emperor Alexander II, who commanded to protect the talented officer.

In November 1856, the already recognized and famous writer left military service and went to travel across Europe.

In 1862, Leo Tolstoy married seventeen-year-old Sophia Andreevna Bers. In their marriage, 13 children were born, five died in early childhood, the novels "War and Peace" (1863-1869) and "Anna Karenina" (1873-1877), recognized as great works, were written.

In the 1880s. Leo Tolstoy went through a powerful crisis that led to the denial of the official state power and its institutions, the realization of the inevitability of death, faith in God and the creation of his own teaching - Tolstoyism. He lost interest in the usual lordly life, he began to have thoughts of suicide and the need to live correctly, to be a vegetarian, to engage in education and physical labor - he plowed, sewed boots, taught children at school. In 1891 he publicly renounced copyright for his literary works written after 1880.

During 1889-1899. Leo Tolstoy wrote the novel Resurrection, whose plot is based on a real court case, and biting articles about the system of government - on this basis, the Holy Synod excommunicated Count Leo Tolstoy from the Orthodox Church and anathematized him in 1901.

On October 28 (November 10), 1910, Leo Tolstoy secretly left Yasnaya Polyana, going on a journey without a specific plan for the sake of his moral and religious ideas of recent years, accompanied by doctor D.P. Makovitsky. On the way, he caught a cold, fell ill with croupous pneumonia and was forced to get off the train at the Astapovo station (now the Lev Tolstoy station of the Lipetsk region). Lev Tolstoy died on November 7 (20), 1910 in the house of the station chief I.I. Ozolin and was buried in Yasnaya Polyana.