Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich. Confession. Tolstoy and his thoughts on the tragic situation in Russia

LESSON 1

LEV NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY (1828-1910). PAGES OF GREAT LIFE

To live honestly, one must be torn, confused,

fight, make mistakes, start and quit, and again

start, and quit again, and forever fight and

to lose, and peace is a spiritual meanness.

Lev Tolstoy

I. Family nest (1828 -1837)

1. Ancestors

Andrei Kharitonovich Tolstoy(head of the Secret Government Chancellery under Peter I) Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy (envoy in Constantinople) Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy (governor in Kazan) Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy(landowner in Yasnaya Polyana)

Mikhail Chernigovskiy Ivan Yuryevich Volkonsky Fedor Ivanovich Volkonsky (heroically died on the Kulikovo field) Sergey Fedorovich Volkonsky (major general) Nikolai Sergeevich Volkonsky (close associate of Catherine II, governor in Arkhangelsk) Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaya

1. Thick:

1823- Nicholas, 1826- Sergey, 1827 - Dmitriy, 1828- A lion, 1830– Maria

1. Childhood(1830 - death of mother)

- Yasnaya Polyana - a sense of beauty, warmth, homeland;

Aunt Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya;

Playing "ant brothers";

Warm, loving atmosphere;

II. Boyhood (1837 - 1841)

1. 1837 - death of his father, moving to Moscow;
2. 1838 - grandmother's death;
3. Separated;
4. 1841 - death of aunt Alexandra Ilyinichna;
5. Departure to Kazan to P.I. Yushkova - the last native aunt.

III. Youth (1841 - 1849)

1. 1841 - 1844 – preparation for the university;
2. 1844 - admission to the Kazan University at the Faculty of Oriental Languages, then at the Faculty of Law;
3. comme il faut ideals, failure in exams for 1 course;
4. 1847 - leaves Kazan and goes to Yasnaya Polyana; passion for Rousseau (the idea of ​​correcting the world through self-improvement); keeping a diary;
5. Failure in economic transformations.

IV. Youth in the Caucasus (1850 - 1853)

1. 1850 - determined to serve in the office of the Tula provincial government;
2. 1851 - departure with his brother Nikolai to the Caucasus;
3. the Cossack village, friendship with Epishka, the alertness of the Cossacks (later he spoke about this in the story "The Cossacks").

V. Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), Youth (1857)

1. the resounding success of the trilogy;

2. image of the inner world of a person (Nikolenka Irteniev);

3. the experience of a unique childish attitude to the world (childhood plays a key role in human development);

4. an extremely painful stage - adolescence;

5. youth - a kind of return to childhood, only more mature.

VI. Tolstoy - a participant in the Crimean War (1853 - 1855)

1. 1853 - the beginning of the Russian-Turkish war;
2. 1854 - transfer to the Danube army, ensign;
3. dreams of a feat, of glory;
4. in the besieged Sevastopol;
5. 1855 - The fourth bastion of Sevastopol, "the hidden warmth of patriotism."
6. 1856 - Chernyshevsky on Tolstoy's "dialectics of the soul".

VII. Writer, public figure, teacher (1855-1870)

1. 1861 - "world mediator" during the peasant reform;
2. passion for pedagogy, trips to Western Europe to study the experience of staging public education, starts public schools in Yasnaya Polyana and its environs, publishes a special pedagogical magazine;
3. 1862 - marriage to S.A. Bers;
4. 1863 - 1868 - work on the novel "War and Peace".

VIII. "I have renounced the life of our circle" (1870-1890)

PEDIGREE Great-grandfather Andrei Ivanovich served as president of the Main
Moscow Magistrate.
His two sons served the Fatherland: Pyotr Andreevich - an associate
Peter I, Ilya Andreevich - officer of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. He
married the daughter of the Minister of War Pelageya Nikolaevna
Gorchakova.

CHILDHOOD

STUDIES

CAUCASUS AND CRIMEAN WAR

Literary activity of the first half of the 1850s.

10. Literary activity of the second half of the 50s.

11. Pedagogical activity

12. Life and creative maturity (1860-1870s)

13. SPIRITUAL CRISIS

14. Literary activity 1880-1890

15. FAMILY LIFE

16. Sofya Andreevna in Yasnaya Polyana for many years becomes a housekeeper, housekeeper, secretary of her husband, educator of children and keeper

17.

18. Recent years.

19.

life path and creative biography(with a generalization of the previously studied). Spiritual searches of the writer. Epic novel "War and Peace".

Stages of life and ideological and creative development of L. Tolstoy.

1. 1828-1849 Childhood, adolescence. Youth: the origins of personality.

2. 1849-1851 Yasnaya Polyana: the experience of independent living.

3. 1851-1855 Military service. On the way to War and Peace.

4. 1860-1870 Writer, public figure, teacher.

5. 1880-1890 "I have renounced the life of our circle."

6. 1900-1910 People and meetings. Exodus.

The best works of Tolstoy.

1. "War and Peace" (1864-1869)

2. "Anna Karenina" (1870-1877)

3. "The Power of Darkness" (1866)

4. "Kreutzer Sonata" (1889-1889)

5. "Resurrection" (1889-1899)

6. "Hadji - Murat" (1896-1905)

7. Comedy "The Fruits of Enlightenment" (1900)

8. Publicistic articles “I can’t be silent”, “Thou shalt not kill and others” (1908)

9. "After the Ball" (1903)

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy left a great artistic heritage, which entered the treasury of not only Russian, but also world literature. A brilliant artist, a passionate moralist, he, perhaps, like no other Russian writer, was the conscience of the nation. Whatever aspects of life this outstanding person touched in his works, he painted with unprecedented depth, humanly wisely and simply. But Tolstoy entered the history of spiritual life not only as a great artist, but also as a kind of thinker. The 19th century neither in Russia nor in Europe knew another such powerful, passionate and ardent "truth seeker". And this greatness of Tolstoy's personality was reflected both in his thoughts and in his whole lifeChildhood, adolescence, youth

In the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, located fourteen miles from the ancient Russian city of Tula, on August 28 (September 11), 1828, the brilliant Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was born.

The Tolstoy family belonged to the highest aristocratic nobility of Russia. Tolstoy's father - Count Nikolai Ilyich - a dreamy young man, The only son of his parents, against the wishes of his relatives, at the age of 17 he entered military service, and for a number of years he participated in many battles Patriotic War 1812. Upon his retirement, he married and settled in his wife's estate in Yasnaya Polyana, where he took care of the household. Tolstoy's mother - Maria Nikolaevna - only daughter Prince N.S. Volkonsky, was an educated woman of her time. She spent most of her youth at Yasnaya Polyana on her father's estate. The couple lived happily: Nikolai Ilyich treated his wife with great respect and was devoted to her; Maria Nikolaevna, on the other hand, felt sincere affection for her husband as for the father of her children. And the Tolstoys had five of them: Nikolai, Dmitry, Sergey, Lev and Maria.

Maria Nikolaevna died shortly after the birth of her daughter Maria, when her youngest son Levushka was not even two years old. He did not remember her at all and, at the same time, in his soul he created a wonderful image of his mother, who he loved all his life. “She seemed to me such a high, pure, spiritual being that often in the middle period of my life, during the struggle with the temptations that overcame me, I prayed to her soul asking her to help me, and this prayer always helped me,” Tolstoy wrote already in mature age.

Carefree and joyful life of L.N. Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana in childhood. The inquisitive boy eagerly absorbed the impressions of the rich Yasnaya Polyana nature and the people around him. Lyovochka loved to read books as a child. He was fond of Pushkin's poems, Krylov's fables. Tolstoy retained his love for Pushkin for life and called him his teacher.

Little Tolstoy was very sensitive. Childhood sorrows of Lyovochka evoked in him, on the one hand, a feeling of tenderness, on the other, a desire to unravel the mysteries of life, and these aspirations remain in him for life.

From the early childhood Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, in addition to relatives and friends, was surrounded by courtyards (servants) and peasants. They provided big influence on Tolstoy; they brought him closer to the people, involuntarily made him think about the question of why life is arranged so unfairly that rich nobles owned land and serfs, lived in idle luxury, and serfs had to work for the nobles, live in need and always obey their own people. gentlemen.

Nikolai Ilyich decided to move the children to Moscow, where there was more opportunity to educate them. Tolstoy was nine years old when he first left Yasnaya Polyana. Later L.N. Tolstoy often had to travel by carriage from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow and back. The impressions from these trips were so strong and vivid that they were vividly reflected in "Childhood", "Boyhood".

Soon after the family moved to Moscow, the father dies. Less than a year after the death of Nikolai Ilyich, Countess Pelageya Nikolaevna died, unable to come to terms with the loss of her son. The Tolstoy children were completely orphans. They were placed under guardianship. At first, their guardian was the closest relative - the kind and deeply religious Alexandra Ilyinichna Osten-Saken; and after her death, which followed in 1841, another aunt, Pelageya Ilyinichna Yushkova, a woman, although not far off, was highly respected in the aristocratic circle, largely thanks to her husband Vladimir Ivanovich Yushkov. The Yushkovs lived in Kazan, where the children were sent. But the closest person for the Tolstoy children is Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya, a distant relative on her father's side. She was a poor, rather attractive woman who had dearly loved Nikolai Ilyich all her life. “Her main feature was love, but no matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise - love for one person - for my father,” Lev Nikolayevich wrote about her. Only starting from this center, her love spilled over to all people " . T.A. Ergolskaya did not go to Kazan with the Tolstoy children.

In the spring of 1844, 16-year-old Tolstoy takes an exam at Kazan University for the Arabic-Turkish department of the Oriental Faculty, with the intention of becoming a diplomat. Dressed in an overcoat with beavers, white gloves and a cocked hat, Tolstoy appeared at Kazan University as a real gentleman. From this time begins his secular life.

Tolstoy was captivated by the exuberant noisy social life. And bright childhood dreams, and vague dreams - everything drowned in this whirlpool of Kazan life. But the more he was among a noisy and idle society, the more often the young man Tolstoy remained lonely, he increasingly disliked this way of life.

Are crumbling and religious performances Tolstoy at this time. “From the age of sixteen, I stopped going to prayer and stopped going to church and fasting on my own impulse,” he recalled in Confession. Secular life tires him and does not satisfy him, he thinks more and more about the falsity of the life of those around him, he begins to experience mental anxiety.

Not having a penchant for diplomacy, Tolstoy, a year after entering the university, decided to transfer to the Faculty of Law, believing that legal sciences are more useful for society.

With great interest, he listens to the lectures of the master of civil law D. Meyer at the university - a supporter of Belinsky, a supporter of advanced ideas. Belinsky's ideas, his articles on literature penetrated the walls of Kazan University and exerted their beneficial influence on young people. Tolstoy enthusiastically read Russian fiction, he liked Pushkin, Gogol, from foreign literature - Goethe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In books, Tolstoy is looking for answers to his questions. Not limited to reading this or that book, he keeps notes about what he read.

But even the legal sciences could not satisfy Tolstoy. He faces more and more questions, to which he could not get an answer at the university.

At the end of his stay at the university, Tolstoy moves from random notes in notebooks to a systematic diary. In his diaries, he sets out the rules of life, which he considers necessary to follow: "1) What is assigned to be fulfilled without fail, then fulfill it, no matter what. 2) What you do, do it well. 3) Never consult a book if you forgot something, but try to remember." Along with drawing up the rules of life, Tolstoy also thinks about the question of the purpose of human life. He defines the purpose of his life as follows: "... a conscious desire for comprehensive development everything that exists"

In 1847, while in his last year, Tolstoy left the university. The main thing that prompted him to do this, as he himself says about it, is the desire to devote himself to life in the village, the desire to do good and love it.

Upon Tolstoy's arrival in Yasnaya Polyana, the division of the father's inheritance took place between the brothers. 19-year-old Lev Nikolaevich, as the youngest of the brothers, got Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy, a young landowner, strives with all his passion to improve his shaken economy. In the village, Tolstoy continues to keep his diary. A characteristic feature of the writer's diaries and at this time is spontaneity, deep sincerity and truthfulness. In them, he paid much attention to introspection, castigated his idle life, his shortcomings. But life in the village still could not fully satisfy the writer and fill his interests. At the beginning of 1849, Tolstoy left for Moscow, and then for St. Petersburg, where he plunged headlong into the "chaotic" life of the secular young man"no service, no occupation, no purpose." He was especially attracted by the "process of extermination of money" at the card table. To put an end to this way of life, Tolstoy decides to leave for the Caucasus. And in April 1851, he was sent along with his brother, officer Nikolai Nikolayevich, who was assigned there.

Caucasus. Sevastopol

L. Tolstoy's trip to the Caucasus was the impetus for the manifestation of the writer's creative forces, which had accumulated even earlier. Impressions from the rich Caucasian nature, from the noisy villages, from the brave and proud people did not prevent the writer from working hard on himself. He is increasingly showing a desire for creativity. Now he does not part with his notebooks, writes down in them everything that he sees in the hut, in the forest, on the street, rewrites the rewritten, corrects. Observations of the life and way of life of the Cossacks formed the basis of one of the most poetic creations of Tolstoy - the story "The Cossacks".

In the Caucasus, Tolstoy wrote part of his trilogy - "Childhood", "Boyhood". In the trilogy there are characters whose prototypes were Tolstoy's relatives, people close to his family, his friends and teachers, but at the center of it stands Nikolenka Irteniev - an unusually impressionable child, internally very mobile, prone to introspection, but at the same time able to observe the surrounding life . These features of Nikolenka are even more pronounced in his adolescence and youth. Tolstoy himself, in his memoirs, written in his old age, pointed out that in "Childhood" the events of the life of his childhood friends and his own were reflected.

Simultaneously with the work on the trilogy, Tolstoy was busy with a work that in handwritten texts and diary entries was entitled "The Novel of a Russian Landowner". In it, Tolstoy intended to set out the "evil of Russian rule," which he saw in the existence in Russia of unlimited tsarist power and serfdom. The novel, on which Tolstoy worked intermittently for about five years, was not completed because Tolstoy could not find a solution to the main question facing him - how to combine the interests of the peasants with the interests of the landowner. In 1856, a significant fragment of the novel was published, entitled "The Morning of the Landowner".

Tolstoy's direct participation in the hostilities in the Caucasus gave him material for stories about the war and about military life. This was reflected mainly in the stories "Raid" and "Cutting down the forest." Tolstoy showed the war from such a side, from which until then it had not been portrayed in literature. He is occupied not so much with the battle theme in itself, but with how people behave in a military situation, what properties of nature a person discovers in a war.

The Caucasian period left a deep mark on Tolstoy's life; he considered him one of best periods of his life - it was a period of spiritual rebirth and literary growth of the writer.

From the Caucasus, Tolstoy moved to Sevastopol. During the Crimean War, he, an artillery officer, fought on the famous 4th bastion, one of the most dangerous sectors of the defense of Sevastopol. In these extreme conditions, Tolstoy showed himself from the best side. He participated in all the combat operations of his unit, skillfully commanded guns and more often than other officers was on duty at the battery. The officers respected him, and among the soldiers he had a reputation as a desperate brave man.

For his bravery, Lieutenant of Artillery Leo Tolstoy was awarded the order Anna and medals "For the defense of Sevastopol" and "In memory of the war of 1853-1856."

"Sevastopol stories" are further development creativity of the young writer. This is the next stage in Tolstoy's portrayal of the war. Here he was the first, in essence, to truthfully show the war "not in the correct, beautiful, brilliant formation, with music and drumming, with waving banners and prancing generals," but "in its true expression - in blood, in suffering, in death."

The combat situation in Sevastopol, closeness with the soldiers cause the writer to think a lot about his future life. He is no longer satisfied with a military career, he writes in his diary: "The military career is not mine, and the sooner I get out of it in order to fully indulge in literary, the better."

In his diaries for 1854, Tolstoy devotes a great deal of attention to introspection; now he speaks of his spinelessness, now of laziness, irritability, considering them important vices. He comes to the conclusion that the higher you try to show yourself to people, the lower you become in their opinion. Despite the love and attention that the writer enjoyed among relatives and friends, he experienced in the Crimea, just as in the Caucasus, a feeling of loneliness.

Yasnaya Polyana School

Having achieved his resignation, in May 1856 Tolstoy returned again to his beloved Yasnaya Polyana. Here he is somehow sad, but pleased. But in order to expand his horizons, to start a new life, which he thought about all the time, Tolstoy went abroad in January 1857. He tries to use his stay there to replenish knowledge. In Paris, Tolstoy met with Turgenev and Nekrasov. He met the French writer and traveler Prosper Merimee. Abroad, Tolstoy wrote the story "From the notes of Prince L. Nekhlyudov. Lucerne" and began the story "Albert". The plot basis of "Lucerne" and "Alberta" was made up of events in which the author took a personal part. Depicting the plight of a street singer (Lucerne) and a drunken violinist (Albert) dying of indifference from patrons, Tolstoy raised the question of the purpose of art, the bitter fate of its servants in a society dominated by egoism, acquisitiveness, careerism, and the idol is money bag.

In August 1857 he returned to Russia, to Yasnaya Polyana. Even a twenty-year-old youth Tolstoy was attracted by pedagogical activity, in 1849 he studied with the children of Yasnaya Polyana peasants. And ten years later, in 1859, he decided to return to her. In search of a way out of his restless, anxious state, in the same wing where he studied music and reading, he opens a school. With curiosity and trepidation, the children came for the first time to the manor's estate to their future teacher. But it was enough for Tolstoy to ask the children a few questions, tell them what they would do at school, and fear was gone. The children themselves began to ask questions, examine the classrooms and listened to the first conversation of the writer, now their teachers.

Tolstoy went headlong into pedagogical work. And he felt the need to get to know the organization of public education more widely, not only in Russia, but also in other countries. In July 1860 Tolstoy went abroad for the second time. The main purpose of the travels was, as he wrote to his brother Sergei Nikolaevich from Paris: "... to find out the current situation of schools abroad, so that no one in Russia would dare to point me to foreign lands in terms of pedagogy, and to be at the level of everything that has been done in this area" . (4, 47)

After the peasant reform (1861), there were endless disputes and misunderstandings between peasants and landlords. Many landowners did not want to give up their rights to the peasants, some did not want to give them land, and such disputes had to be resolved by mediators. Upon arrival from abroad, Tolstoy was appointed mediator in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province. But the writer had a second thing - it was his school. As soon as he arrived from abroad, he immediately began to study with students, there were about 50 of them. At this time, he was already seeking recognition for his school and became a parish folk teacher. Tolstoy was passionately fond of schoolwork. The fame of the Yasnaya Polyana school spread not only throughout the Tula province, it was known in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and even abroad. In addition to his Yasnaya Polyana school, Tolstoy then organized several schools in the surrounding villages. So, in October 1861, three schools were opened - Golovenkovskaya, Zhitovskaya and Lomintsevskaya, then in the area where Tolstoy was a mediator, the number of schools reached twenty-one.

Family life. "War and Peace"

No matter how fond of Tolstoy his school and intermediary activities, he still could not drown out the artist-writer in himself, he was more drawn to the creation of works of art than before. Tolstoy had an irresistible desire to artistic images to tell about Russian life, about what worries him, to express his sincere views, his ideas, his feelings, to tell about what he has lived and experienced during this time. He is collecting material for the novel "The Decembrists", which he planned to write abroad, after meeting the Decembrist S.G. Volkonsky, who returned only from exile, writes the story "Polikushka", finishes the story "Cossacks", on which he worked intermittently for about 10 years.

Despite the beginning of the rise of literary work, it was more and more difficult for Tolstoy to live alone. In the summer of 1862, he felt particularly lonely. "I have no friends, no! I am alone. There were friends when I served mammon, and no, when I serve the truth."

He is sad and sad, and more and more often continues to travel to Moscow and visit there in the family of the famous court doctor Andrei Evstafievich Bers, who had three daughters - Lisa, Sonya and Tanya. Here Tolstoy feels warmth and comfort. And he is irresistibly drawn to the middle daughter of the Berses Sonya. He liked her for her simple disposition, her cordiality, gaiety, and lively mind. Sofya Andreevna brought great animation and comfort to the life of Yasnaya Polyana. Now the writer has found peace of mind. He was content with his life. All his worries and doubts seemed to have vanished. Tolstoy became clearer life path. Surrounded by the attention of his wife, Tolstoy is completely immersed in literary work. New images take him deep into the history of our country - to the great battlefields of the Russian people. Tolstoy lives with his heroes and paints pictures of Russian social life during the Patriotic War of 1812.

In 1862, seven years had passed since the fall of Sevastopol, Russia had not yet healed its wounds, the Russian people were still deeply worried about their defeat and the fall of Sevastopol. It was necessary to breathe into the people faith in themselves, in their strength, in their courage, to set an example of the strength of the people, to awaken their national self-consciousness, to show the spiritual beauty of the Russian people, their heroic struggle for their independence. All this is reflected in the immortal epic "War and Peace". The novel "War and Peace" Tolstoy began writing in 1863 and finished in 1869. Before starting the novel War and Peace, Tolstoy studied letters, manuscripts, newspapers, books about the history of the Patriotic War of 1812, he was interested in the memoirs of his contemporaries, their stories about this time, he read the history of Alexander Y and Napoleon, studied their relationship, their characters and their environment. And secluded in his office, Tolstoy painted images of the charming Natasha Rostova, and the noble Andrei Bolkonsky, an independent and proud patriot, his father Vasily and the good-natured, honest Pierre Bezukhov and other heroes of the novel. Tolstoy's life during the period of his inspired work on the novel "War and Peace" passed more or less calmly. In the summer of 1863, the first-born Seryozha was born to the Tolstoy couple. A year later, daughter Tanya was born.

70s. "Anna Karenina". spiritual crisis

After a tense long work Tolstoy is finishing his brilliant epic - the novel "War and Peace". It was possible to take a break in work, but the writer was already growing new desires, new needs, and he writes: "The soul asked for something - I wanted something. What do I want?" he asked himself. He himself was not clear about his desires, but he felt the need to change his life, he felt a growing spiritual anxiety, a desire to find something that was not in the environment. In this search for the eternally new, all the ingenious passionate living nature of the writer is reflected. He wants to be reborn and be completely different.

He studies the dramas of Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe. I suddenly started learning Greek. Once again, he had a burning desire to work in the field of education. He was captivated by the idea of ​​training teachers from the people, he tried to open a "University in bast shoes", in the words of Sofya Andreevna. But he failed to do so due to lack of funds.

The books that children were taught from were boring and incomprehensible, and Tolstoy had the idea to write a new "ABC" and books for reading for schools. He writes many small children's stories, fables, fairy tales and at the same time creates a big story "Prisoner of the Caucasus". Tolstoy worked on it very carefully, especially on the language of the story, achieving its simplicity and clarity, so that it could pass "through the censorship of janitors, cabbies, black cooks."

"ABC" was not very successful. Tolstoy soon set about creating great works of art.

Tolstoy takes a new idea - to portray the type married woman from high society, who lost herself, pathetic, but not guilty. This image arose from the writer as early as 1870. This was the idea of ​​the novel "Anna Karenina". In "Anna Karenina" Tolstoy is still the same great artist-psychologist, an extraordinary connoisseur of human soul, from whose eyes the slightest movement of her will not hide. He showed us new human identities and penetrated new psychological depths. Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, Levin, Kitty, Stiva Oblonsky, his wife Dolly - all these images are wonderful artistic discoveries that only Tolstoy's ever-growing talent could do. The novel "Anna Karenina", according to Dostoevsky, "perfection as a work of art, with which nothing similar from European literature in the present era can be compared."

After long and joyful years of life, the Tolstoy family suffered a heavy grief. Died in 1873 younger son writer Petya. In the summer of 1874, his beloved aunt Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya, who occupied a large place in the life of the writer, died.

Tolstoy was finishing his novel Anna Karenina at a time when more than ten years had passed since the abolition of serfdom and when the old order was rapidly changing in Russia, but the new one had not yet been established. When the landowner's land passed to the peasants, but they could not master it, and therefore some of them left the land, went to the city to work, and only a small part of the peasants bought land from the ruined peasants. Tolstoy was haunted by thoughts about the fate of the peasants and the ruined landowner, about their relationship, and he painfully sought a way out of this historically created situation.

The writer continued to go for walks, disappear on the hunt, outwardly live as before, but in his soul anxiety and dissatisfaction with life grew. And in order to drown out these feelings in himself, Tolstoy especially makes a lot of music, he plays the piano for 4-6 hours a day. While playing, he seemed to listen to himself, to his inner voice, to that new one that was growing in his soul. Both in music and in hunting, he wanted to forget his oppressive thoughts and sorrowful feelings. But the feeling of dissatisfaction was so strong that neither music, nor hunting, nor the performance of religious rites could calm him down. In such cases, the writer tried to join the thick of the people, where he found, as it seemed to him, the resolution of doubts that tormented him, he gained faith in himself and in life.

After long painful reflections, after intense searching, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that the class to which he belonged was incapable of being reborn, incapable of saving the fate of his beloved homeland, incapable of building a rational society in which everyone would be happy. He saw the impassable abyss between the two worlds - the world of the exploiters, fattened by high-ranking tsarist officials, and the world of the oppressed, living in hopeless poverty, and he realized that all his ideals, all his hopes for class unity were crumbling, that the landlords would never go towards unification with people.

The writer clearly saw that everyone was deceiving the people: the government, the landlords, the merchants, and the priests. The writer is seized with confusion and despair, he even thinks about suicide, just like his hero Levin in the novel "Anna Karenina". How to live? What to do next? A writer cannot live without faith in the future of his people, his country. Where to find a fulcrum, what to cling to? And Tolstoy now turns all his eyes to the working people. Tolstoy is so accustomed to the life of the common people that he himself begins to express their views, their interests, their worldview, that is, he finally leaves his class.

Tolstoy wrote about his spiritual upheaval in Confession, on which he began work in early 1880. In it, summing up the results of his activities until the 1980s, he also explained the causes of the spiritual crisis. "I renounced the life of our circle, recognizing that this is not life, but only a semblance of life..."

Religious writings also attracted his attention. He reads the writings of Archpriest Avvakum, the Gospel and others. In order to clarify religious issues, to learn about the life of people and their way of life, in the spring of 1881 Tolstoy walks with his servant S.P. Arbuzov to the monastery - Optina Pustyn. He considers his journey very important and useful. It is important for him to see "... how the world of God lives, big, real, and not the one that we arranged for ourselves and from which we do not leave, even if we traveled around the world"

In Optina Desert, Tolstoy is disappointed in the elders. But on the other hand, he admires the common people more and more, admires his wisdom and kindness.

Neither road adversity, nor the difficulties of travel, nor age stopped the writer. He himself said that the road was terribly difficult for him, restless, but nevertheless he left again and again or went either to Optina Pustyn, then to Kiev, then to the Samara steppes, then to Moscow, then to Petersburg.

And he is insane looking for storms,

As if there is peace in the storms.

With these words, Sofya Andreevna Lermontova expressed her husband's endless desire for movement, the eternal search for something new.

While Tolstoy's family wanted a quiet life, he was thirsty for knowledge, he was looking for the truth, he wanted to know how people live. In search of truth, Tolstoy also traveled to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, talked there with high clergymen and came to an even greater conviction that the church with its servants does not defend the interests of the people, but of its oppressors, the government. Confessors, according to Tolstoy, forever left the true path of serving people at the moment when "they consecrated the first tsar and assured him that he could help the faith with his name." Wishing to expose the lies, the deceit of the church and the state and give advice to people on how to live, Tolstoy begins to write on religious and philosophical topics, he writes the article "Church and State", which causes dissatisfaction on the part of others.

But the writer was attracted by life more than the peasants, the life of the village. Tolstoy talks for a long time with peasants, goes to huts, courtyards, visits peasant fields, meadows, works with them, tries to understand and comprehend their work, their moral principles, their morality, to understand and study their speech. During a conversation with peasants, Tolstoy writes down individual words, folk proverbs, sayings, well-aimed folk expressions. The notebooks of 1879 served as Tolstoy's later materials for many of his works of art, mainly for folk stories.

80s. Moscow

The family of Lev Nikolaevich grew up. He already had seven children. Older children become adults. They had to be educated. And in the autumn of 1881 the writer's family moved to Moscow. Soon after moving to Moscow, Lev Nikolayevich set about identifying children. The eldest son Sergei studied at the university, Ilya and Leo were assigned to a private Polivanovskaya gymnasium. For the eldest daughter Tatyana, the artist V.G. Perov was invited, and then she entered the school of painting and later studied with the artist N.N. Ge.

Lev Nikolaevich was dissatisfied with the move to Moscow, he was burdened and annoyed by the luxury of the rooms in which he settled. He was irritated by street noise, the hustle and bustle of the city, he yearned, sought communion with the people and nature. To save himself from longing, he began to cross the Moscow River by boat and go to the Sparrow Hills, and there in the midst of nature he found a rest from city life, met working people in the forest, drank with joy, chopped firewood with them and talked for a long time.

At the beginning of 1882, Tolstoy took an active part in the census of Moscow, which was carried out over three days. After visiting the Khitrov market, where he saw hungry, dirty, half-dressed people, after participating in the census, Tolstoy was even more seized by hatred for the ruling classes, and sympathy for all the oppressed and enslaved grew in him even more. He reflects his observations during the census in his works. He begins to write an incensive article full of anger "So what do we do?". Tolstoy boldly threw fiery words of accusation against the world of masters, the world of oppressors. Simultaneously with the work on the article, Tolstoy continues to work on folk stories.

Tolstoy in the period of Moscow life with all passion turns to the philosophy of the peoples of the East. He enthusiastically reads the Chinese thinker Confucius, reads everything related to the life of the Chinese people, their way of life, religion. He reads with interest the Chinese thinker Lao Tzu, translates it into Russian, writes out individual thoughts.

big love fed L.N. Tolstoy to Indian folk wisdom to folk poetry. The ideas and thoughts of the Eastern sages were in tune with Tolstoy.

But philosophy could not resolve all the doubts and painful questions facing the writer. Not finding answers to tormenting questions in philosophy, he turns to economic literature, the writer reads Henry George's book on the nationalization of land. It seemed to Tolstoy that now it would be possible to resolve the difficult peasant question of land. He tried to put George's theory into practice. And these attempts in life are reflected in the novel "Resurrection".

Since 1884, Tolstoy has become a vegetarian, quits smoking, and strives for an even greater simplicity of life. More and more insistently, the thought seizes him, but is it possible to leave this manor's estate, is it possible to settle in a peasant's hut, live together with the working people. But Tolstoy was still far from this step, he was still deeply rooted in the economy and was still firmly connected with the family.

Helping the Yasnaya Polyana widow Kopylova to carry hay in the summer of 1886, L.N. Tolstoy hurt his leg and was bedridden for about three months. During his illness, Tolstoy recalled an incident from a court case given to him for acquaintance by the Tula prosecutor Davydov.

The play "The Power of Darkness" was written by him rather quickly, already at the end of 1886 Tolstoy finished it. In his play, Tolstoy shows how money disfigures a person's life, pushing him to crime. They destroy the foundations of the peasant family, corrupt people, trample on human feelings. They made criminals both Matryona and Nikita, basically good people. Shown in the play vivid images peasants who are in the "power of darkness", living in the "dark kingdom".

In the same year as The Power of Darkness, one of Tolstoy's remarkable stories, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, was published, written on the theme of the horror of the dying of a person whose whole being was filled with insignificant and miserable worldly vanity.

No sooner had Tolstoy finished the play "The Power of Darkness" than he set about writing a new play, "The Fruits of Enlightenment." This comedy is built on the opposition of two worlds - the world of destitute, robbed peasants and the world of robbers, oppressors of peasants. The tsarist government did not allow the comedy "The Fruits of Enlightenment" for a long time to be printed and staged in theaters, but the play went from hand to hand and was staged on home and amateur stages. Only in the autumn of 1891 did the first production take place on the stage of the Alexandria Theatre.

Tolstoy's plays were transferred to the stage not only in Russian theaters, they were also staged on the stages of theaters in Paris, London, and Berlin.

In the summer of 1887, the then-famous actor V.N. Andreev-Burlak, reader-reciter. Burlak told Tolstoy the story of his wife's betrayal, which he heard from one of the passengers when he was traveling to Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy made this story the basis of his new work, The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy began work on it in 1887 and completed it in 1889. The Kreutzer Sonata was a great success, but it was banned from publication and all attempts to obtain permission to print it remained in vain. And only in March 1891 Sofya Andreevna, having achieved a personal meeting with the tsar in St. Petersburg, received permission to print the "Kreutzer Sonata" in the complete works of Tolstoy.

90s. "Resurrection"

An expression of passionate protest against the fundamental foundations of the autocratic system was Tolstoy's novel Resurrection, on which he worked for ten years, intermittently, from 1889 to 1899. The material for the novel "Resurrection" was the trial of a "fallen" woman, a prostitute Rozalia, accused of stealing a hundred rubles from her drunken "guest" merchant Smelkov and poisoning him. She was found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. In the novel "Resurrection" Russian life of the end of the 20th century is widely covered, the deepest and most complex problems of that time are touched upon.

In 1890, in early spring, during the period of work on "Resurrection", in search of truth, Lev Nikolaevich again goes to Optina Pustyn. Tolstoy still wants to know the real faith. In Optina Hermitage, he talks with Elder Ambrose about different faiths, but even there he does not find an answer to his exciting questions. Tolstoy left the monastery dissatisfied. He did not find any truth there, he did not recognize any true faith, and the one he saw there is still the same deception, the same lie.

In Yasnaya Polyana, the seeker of human happiness is now more than ever worried about "idleness, fat." It's hard for him, it's hard. He is ashamed that he has to lead a dirty, vile life in order not to violate "love", not to violate family life. Tolstoy continues to have many guests. Empty conversations with them make him disgusted with an idle life, and he writes: "Guests are the disaster of our life." Only the arrival of N.N. Ge for Tolstoy "great joy."

main reason Tolstoy's dissatisfaction and anxiety was that he did not see a real joyful life around him. “I yearn very much for the inexpediency of life,” he writes in his diary. All his life Tolstoy sought happiness for the people. He believed that it should be here on earth, and not in heaven, as the ministers of the church assured of this. Tolstoy passionately wanted there to be no poor, beggars, hungry, prisons, executions, wars, murders and enmity between peoples. The writer treated all peoples with equal respect, for him the equality of all people is an axiom, without which he cannot think. “What lies in the heart of one person lies in the consciousness of every other, and what lies in the consciousness of one people lies in the consciousness of every other,” he wrote in a letter to Getz.

The writer believed that the people needed to bring light. Tolstoy considered the introduction of knowledge and science into the consciousness of the working people an important matter and paid much attention, much energy to the creation and dissemination of literature that would satisfy the needs of the people. But if literature is to serve the people, then this service must be free of charge, this service cannot be sold. And Lev Nikolaevich invites Sofya Andreevna to write a letter to the editors of Russkiye Vedomosti about his refusal of copyright to his works. And that everyone who wishes in Russia and abroad should have the right to publish free of charge his works written since 1881.

In 1891-1892, famine broke out in the central provinces of Russia. Tolstoy painfully experienced the people's disaster. Tolstoy's activities in helping the starving took on the widest dimensions. He organizes canteens. In addition, he is trying to draw public attention to the outbreak of a national disaster, writes an article "On the famine." The government was terribly indignant at the publication of the article. And with the same indignation the government met Tolstoy's second article on the famine, The Terrible Question, and the Conclusion to the Last Report on Assistance to the Starving was even forbidden to be printed in Russia, it was published in 1896 abroad.

These articles reflected the whole terrible reality of the starving villages and were filled with such passionate pathos of denunciation, such anger towards the ruling class, that even, against the will of the writer, it infected a significant part of Russian society with deep hatred for the existing system.

Tolstoy considered the inevitable change in existing forms of life, the inevitable destruction of the existing system. Tolstoy severely denounced the hated autocratic system in his journalistic articles and in his immortal novel Resurrection.

But no matter how the tsarist government hated Tolstoy for his articles, the Ministry of the Interior did not dare to bring Tolstoy to justice, since the writer's popularity was great not only in Russia, but also abroad. Tolstoy's writings, his ideas, his fame as an original, original, brilliant writer spread far beyond the borders of Russia. Scientists, writers came to him from abroad, public figures, a correspondence was established with him. Levenfeld came from Berlin. He wrote the first biography of Tolstoy in German.

Even in his youth, in his early works, Tolstoy preached the idea of ​​self-improvement and now came to the conclusion that the kingdom of prosperity must be created within the person himself. "The kingdom of God is within you", you need to improve your spirit, your consciousness, you need to free yourself from passions, from desires to arrange personal well-being, you need to create inner happiness, independent of external conditions, and develop such a point of view on life that no external conditions did not interfere with a good and happy life - these are the foundations of Tolstoy's "teachings".

Considering that a person's life should be a kind of sermon on how to live, Tolstoy understood that his personal life did not always correspond to his stated requirements for it, and this was one of the reasons for his restless state, his ever-growing dissatisfaction with life.

For a long time now, the writer has been weighed down by his position as an owner. Not wanting to continue to be him, in July 1892 he signs a separate act, according to which all real estate, that is, land, forest, buildings, is transferred to his wife and children.

In February 1895, Tolstoy wrote the story "The Master and the Worker" and in January 1896 sent it to print. This story was awaited with impatience, because rumors had already spread that Tolstoy had dried up as an artist and could no longer write, and the story "The Master and the Worker" testified to the opposite. The story was a great success, although it caused a lot of controversy.

The spring of 1895 was the most difficult in the life of the Tolstoy couple. The youngest, thirteenth child, Vanechka, seven years old, dies, short life which combined the late love of Lev Nikolaevich and Sofya Andreevna.

From 1897 to 1898 Tolstoy worked on his famous treatise What is Art? In 1899, the novel "Resurrection" was completed and published in the magazine "Niva".

The last ten years of L.N. Tolstoy

And life, meanwhile, did not stand still. The 20th century was already on the threshold. The world was changing right before our eyes. Tolstoy foresaw that the coming century would bring with it the threat of global wars unprecedented in their scale. Tolstoy expressed his visionary thoughts in passionate, accusatory articles, and the whole world listened to his words. He listened, but there was no peace in him. By that time, Yasnaya Polyana had become not just a family abode, but a place of pilgrimage. An endless stream of visitors from all over the world reached out to Tolstoy. "The whole world, the whole earth is looking at him: from China, India, America - living quivering threads are stretched to him from everywhere, his soul is for everyone and forever," M. Gorky wrote about him. The life of the great old man was filled with work, talking, reading...

After the novel "Resurrection" Tolstoy wants to write journalistic articles. But before proceeding to the articles, he wrote another play, The Living Corpse. He worked on it for over six months. The main protagonist of The Living Corpse, Fedya Protasov, is a living embodiment against the purely formal foundations of family life legalized by society and the state, which fasten the life of spouses together not with a sense of mutual attraction, but with bonds of legal coercion. The drama "The Living Corpse" was not completely finished by Tolstoy. It seemed to him that he was writing a frivolous thing, that he needed to depict the life of the people, but he forgot about him.

Tolstoy is occupied with the idea that it is necessary for everyone to refuse to serve and obey the state, which dooms the people to poverty, hunger and incredible suffering. In his articles, he sharply criticizes the tsarist officials, the church, the state, mercilessly exposes the perpetrators of the oppression of the working masses. He believes that there is only one remedy that can destroy government violence, and that is "refraining people from participating in violence." People, in his opinion, should improve themselves spiritually, and then the kingdom of God will be established on earth, that is happy life of people.

Writer on the living concrete examples in an accessible and vivid form in his articles he showed the lack of rights of the working people, their terrible life, and immediately painted pictures of the idle life of those responsible for the death and suffering of thousands of the masses. These articles of Tolstoy filled the hearts of the people with love for the great writer, with such courage throwing into the dark realm of lies and deceit fiery words of truth, words that burn the hearts of people.

In 1901, the Holy Synod excommunicated Tolstoy from the church and anathematized him. The immediate turn to excommunication was the novel Resurrection, mainly its chapters, in which Tolstoy exposed the hypocrisy, deceit of the state church and ridiculed the then Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod K. Pobedonostsev in the image of Toporov. In all churches, at the direction of the Holy Synod, during the services they cursed the name of Tolstoy as an apostate, trying to arouse hatred for the writer among believers, using their religious feelings. But despite this, Tolstoy's popularity grew.

The excitement he experienced led Tolstoy to a painful state. In the spring of 1891, on the advice of doctors, Tolstoy went to the Crimea. In the Crimea, during his illness, Tolstoy did not leave his literary studies. He gradually began to work on journalistic articles addressed to the working class. In Gaspra he was visited by A.P. Chekhov, A.M. Bitter. Tolstoy's illness proceeded unevenly. He felt better, then worse again. With the onset of the summer of 1902, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana.

In 1903, Tolstoy wrote the story "After the Ball", the theme of which was a real case. The story uses the principle of artistic contrast: bright, colorful picture a merry ball in a noble assembly is replaced by a harsh scene of painful punishment of a defenseless soldier. Simultaneously with the story, Tolstoy wrote three fairy tales. The motifs of these tales are taken from the Thousand and One Nights. Fairy tales were not allowed by the censorship: they appeared in print only in 1906.

In 1904, the Russo-Japanese War broke out. To the depths of his soul, Tolstoy was agitated by the new people's grief. He sharply condemns governments that have unleashed a bloody slaughter of peoples in their own interests. At this time, he writes the article "Rethink". In it, Tolstoy called the Far Eastern War one of the most terrible atrocities committed by the tsarist government against the Russian people. Following the war of 1904, a revolution broke out in Russia. The working class and the peasantry rose up to fight the capitalists and landlords. Tolstoy's attitude to the revolution of 1905 was contradictory, he welcomed it as a social movement that destroys the violence of the exploiters, their age-old oppression, but Tolstoy was against the violent overthrow of the capitalists, landlords, against the violent liquidation of private property.

In 1908, Tolstoy wrote an unusually strong article "I can not be silent", directed against the death penalty, against the government, executioners and robbers. After the suppression of the revolution of 1905, the tsarist government attacked the participants in the revolution with all its might. In many cities of Russia, workers and peasants were shot, gallows were erected, on which advanced people who raised their voice or hand against the oppressors perished. In his article, Tolstoy passed a harsh sentence on both the tsarist government and its officials for the atrocities committed in the country, he considered them responsible for the murders and deaths of a thousand advanced people of Russia.

Tolstoy's most important works of the last decade include the remarkable historical story "Hadji Murat". He worked on this story until the last days of his life. In the introduction to Hadji Murat, Tolstoy openly formulated the main idea of ​​his story: all living things, to their last strength, to their last breath, must fight for life, resist those forces that cripple, mutilate, kill life. He took the manuscript of Hadji Murat with him when he left Yasnaya Polyana for good, hoping to continue working on it, but the manuscript remained unfinished. The story was published after Tolstoy's death in 1912.

In the last months of his life, Tolstoy worked on the work "There are no guilty in the world", which has come down to us in three unfinished versions. Each of them contrasts the lives of the rich and the poor.

In the diaries and letters of Tolstoy, starting from the 80s, more and more confessions appeared about his discord with his wife and almost all children on the basis of opposing views on life, about his deep mental suffering caused by the fact that he, not daring to leave his wife and children, was forced to lead a hated "lordly life". The roots of these disagreements go back to earlier years. In the very first months of family life, Tolstoy and his wife discovered that they looked at many things differently, that each of them had his own tastes, habits, and neither one nor the other did not intend to give them up. Tolstoy wanted to leave home for a long time, already thirty years, but all these years he did not dare to carry out his plan. All it needed was a push.

Such an impetus was that he saw Sofya Andreevna feverishly sorting through papers in his office, trying to find an official will about Lev Nikolaevich's refusal of copyright to his compositions, which was drawn up secretly from the family. It was too much. The cup of patience overflowed. And he left. Gone into the darkness, into the unknown. Gone on his last mournful journey.

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy died on November 7 (20), 1910 at the deaf unknown station Astapovo of Moscow-Kursk railway. The coffin with the body of Tolstoy was transported to Yasnaya Polyana. They buried him, as he wanted, in the Yasnaya Polyana forest "Order", on the edge of a ravine, where, according to legend, a "green stick" was buried, on which was written something that should destroy all evil in people and give them great blessings ...

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next lecture ==> In what works of Russian classics is the conflict between representatives of different generations depicted, and in what way can these works be compared with Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons"? The expression of the cross product in terms of the coordinates of the vectors. Grisha Dobrosklonov is the hero of what work by N.A. Nekrasov? The unity of the work. Frame (aesthetic aspect of analysis) My attitude to faith now and then was completely different. Previously, life itself seemed to me the fulfillment of meaning, and faith seemed to be an arbitrary assertion of some completely unnecessary, unreasonable and unrelated propositions to me. I then asked myself what meaning these provisions had, and, convinced that they did not have it, I threw them away. Now, on the contrary, I knew for sure that my life did not and could not have any meaning, and the positions of faith not only did not seem unnecessary to me, but I was led by undoubted experience to the conviction that only these positions of faith give the meaning of life. Previously, I looked at them as completely unnecessary gibberish, but now, if I did not understand them, I knew that they made sense, and told myself that I had to learn to understand them. I made the following argument. I told myself the knowledge of faith follows, like all mankind with its mind, from a mysterious beginning. This beginning is God, the beginning of both the human body and its mind. Just as my body came to me successively from God, so did my mind and my comprehension of life come to me, and therefore all those stages of development of this comprehension of life cannot be false. Whatever people truly believe must be true; it can be expressed in various ways, but it cannot be a lie, and therefore if it seems to me a lie, it only means that I do not understand it. In addition, I said to myself: the essence of any faith is that it gives life a meaning that is not destroyed by death. Naturally, in order for faith to be able to answer the question of a king dying in luxury, an old slave tormented by work, an unintelligent child, a wise old man, a half-witted old woman, a young happy woman, a youth restless with passions, all people under the most diverse conditions of life and education, - Naturally, if there is one answer that answers the eternal one question of life: "Why do I live, what will come of my life?" - then this answer, although one in its essence, must be infinitely diverse in its manifestations; and the more united, the truer, the deeper this answer, the more naturally strange and ugly it must appear in its attempts at expression, according to the education and position of each. But these reasonings, which justify for me the strangeness of the ritual side of faith, were still insufficient for me myself, in that only work of life for me, in faith, to allow myself to do things that I would doubt. I wished with all the strength of my soul to be able to merge with the people, fulfilling the ritual side of their faith; but I couldn't do it. I felt that I would be lying to myself, mocking what is sacred to me, if I did. But then new, our Russian theological writings came to my aid. According to the explanation of these theologians, the fundamental dogma of faith is the infallible church. From the recognition of this dogma follows, as a necessary consequence, the truth of everything professed by the Church. The Church, as an assembly of believers united by love and therefore having true knowledge, has become the foundation of my faith. I told myself that divine truth cannot be accessible to one person, it is revealed only to the whole set of people united by love. In order to comprehend the truth, one must not be divided; and in order not to be divided, one must love and reconcile with what one disagrees with. Truth will be revealed to love, and therefore, if you do not obey the rites of the church, you violate love; and by violating love, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to know the truth. I did not then see the sophistry contained in this reasoning. I didn’t see then that unity in love can give the greatest love, but I didn’t see the theological truth expressed in certain words in the Nicene symbol, I didn’t see what love can in no way do famous expression truth is indispensable for unity. I did not then see the error of this reasoning and thanks to it I was able to accept and perform all the rites Orthodox Church without understanding most of them. At that time I tried with all the strength of my soul to avoid any arguments, contradictions and tried to explain, as reasonably as possible, those church positions that I came across. Performing the rites of the church, I humbled my mind and subordinated myself to the tradition that all mankind had. I united with my ancestors, with my loved ones - father, mother, grandfathers, grandmothers. They and all the former ones believed and lived, and produced me. I connected with all the millions of people I respect from the people. Moreover, these actions themselves did not have anything bad in them (I considered indulgence to lusts to be bad). Getting up early for church service, I knew that I was doing well only because in order to humble my pride of mind, to get closer to my ancestors and contemporaries, so that, in the name of searching for the meaning of life, I would sacrifice my bodily peace. It was the same during fasting, during the daily reading of prayers with bows, the same when observing all fasts. No matter how insignificant these sacrifices were, they were sacrifices in the name of good. I used to eat, fast, observe temporary prayers at home and in church. In listening to church services, I delved into every word and gave them meaning when I could. At mass, the most important words for me were: "Let us love one another and with one mind..." Further words: "We confess the father and the son and the holy spirit" - I skipped because I could not understand them. XIV It was so necessary for me then to believe in order to live, that I unconsciously hid from myself the contradictions and ambiguities of the dogma. But this comprehension of rituals had a limit. If the litany became clearer and clearer for me in its main words, if I somehow explained to myself the words: “Let us commit our most holy lady, the Theotokos, and all the saints, to ourselves, and to each other, and our whole life to Christ our God,” - if i explained frequent repetition prayers for the king and his relatives because they are more subject to temptation than others, and therefore require prayers more, then prayers for subjugation under the feet of the enemy and adversary, if I explained them by the fact that the enemy is evil - these and other prayers, like the cherubic and the whole sacrament of the proskomedia or the “chosen voivode”, etc., almost two-thirds of all services either had no explanations at all, or I felt that, in giving them explanations, I was lying and thereby completely destroying my relationship with God, losing absolutely every possibility of faith. I experienced the same when celebrating major holidays. It was clear to me to remember the Sabbath day, that is, to dedicate one day to turning to God. But main holiday there was a memory of the event of the resurrection, the reality of which I could not imagine and understand. And this Sunday was the name of the weekly celebrated day. And in these days the sacrament of the Eucharist was celebrated, which was completely incomprehensible to me. The rest of all twelve holidays, except for Christmas, were memories of miracles, about what I tried not to think about so as not to deny: Ascension, Pentecost, Epiphany, Intercession, etc. When celebrating these holidays, feeling that importance is attributed to For myself, which for me is of the utmost importance, I either invented explanations that calmed me, or closed my eyes so as not to see what tempted me. This happened to me most strongly when participating in the most common sacraments, considered the most important: baptism and communion. Here, not only did I come across not only incomprehensible, but quite understandable actions: these actions seemed seductive to me, and I was put in a dilemma - either to lie or to reject. I will never forget the painful feeling I experienced on the day when I took communion for the first time after many years. Services, confession, rules - all this was clear to me and produced in me a joyful consciousness that the meaning of life was being revealed to me. Communion itself I explained to myself as an action performed in remembrance of Christ and signifying cleansing from sin and full acceptance of the teachings of Christ. If this explanation was artificial, then I did not notice its artificiality. It was so joyful for me, humbled and humbled before my confessor, a simple timid priest, to turn out all the dirt of my soul, repenting of my vices, it was so joyful to merge in my thoughts with the aspirations of the fathers who wrote the prayers of the rules, it was so joyful to be united with all those who believed and believed that I did not feel the artificiality of my explanation. But when I approached the royal doors and the priest made me repeat what I believe, that what I will swallow is the true body and blood, it cut me to the heart; it's not much of a wrong note, it's a cruel demand from someone who obviously never knew what faith is. But now I allow myself to say that this was a cruel demand, but at the same time I did not even think of it, I was only inexpressibly hurt. I was no longer in the position in which I was in my youth, thinking that everything in life is clear; After all, I came to faith because, apart from faith, I didn’t find anything, probably nothing, except death, so it was impossible to discard this faith, and I submitted. And I found a feeling in my soul that helped me bear it. It was a feeling of self-humiliation and humility. I resigned myself, swallowed this blood and body without sacrilege, with a desire to believe, but the blow had already been dealt. And knowing in advance what awaits me, I could no longer go another time. I continued to perform the rites of the church in the same way and still believed that there was truth in the creed that I followed, and something happened to me that is now clear to me, but then it seemed strange. I listened to the conversation of an illiterate peasant wanderer about God, about faith, about life, about salvation, and the knowledge of faith was revealed to me. I approached the people, listening to their judgments about life, about faith, and I understood the truth more and more. The same thing happened to me when reading the Chetia Menaia and the Prologues; it became my favorite reading. Excluding miracles, looking at them as a plot expressing a thought, this reading revealed to me the meaning of life. There were the lives of Macarius the Great, Joasaph Tsarevich (the story of Buddha), there were the words of John Chrysostom, the words about a traveler in a well, about a monk who found gold, about Peter the publican; there is the history of the martyrs, all declaring one thing, that death does not exclude life; there are stories of illiterate, stupid and unaware of the teachings of the church who were saved. But as soon as I came into contact with learned believers or took their books, some kind of self-doubt, discontent, bitterness of the dispute arose in me, and I felt that the more I delve into their speeches, the more I move away from the truth and go to abyss. 7 The writer is relentlessly haunted by the thought of the tragic situation in Russia: “Crowded Siberia, prisons, war, gallows, poverty of the people, blasphemy, greed and cruelty of the authorities ...” He perceives the plight of the people as his personal misfortune, which cannot be forgotten for a moment. S. A. Tolstaya writes in her diary: “... suffering about misfortunes, injustice of people, about their poverty, about prisoners in prisons, about the anger of people, about oppression - all this affects his impressionable soul and burns his existence.” Continuing the work begun by War and Peace, the writer delves into the study of Russia's past in order to find the origins and explanation of the present. Tolstoy resumes work on a novel about the Petrine era, interrupted by the writing of Anna Karenina. This work brings him back to the theme of Decembrism, which led the writer to War and Peace in the 1960s. At the end of the 70s, both plans merged into one - truly colossal: Tolstoy conceived an epic that was supposed to cover a whole century, from the time of Peter to the uprising of the Decembrists. This idea remained in outline. The historical research of the writer deepened his interest in folk life. He critically looks at the works of scientists who reduced the history of Russia to the history of reigns and conquests, and comes to the conclusion that main character stories are people. Tolstoy studies the situation of the working masses in contemporary Russia and behaves not as an outside observer, but as a defender of the oppressed: he organizes assistance to the starving peasants, visits courts and prisons, standing up for the innocently convicted. The participation of the writer in the life of the people was also manifested in his pedagogical activity. She became especially active in the 1970s. Tolstoy, he said, wants education for the people in order to save the sinking Pushkins and Lomonosovs, who "swarm in every school." In the early 1980s, Tolstoy participated in the All-Russian population census. He takes over the work in the so-called "Rzhanovsky fortress" - a Moscow brothel of "the most terrible poverty and debauchery." The "dregs of society" living here, in the eyes of the writer, are the same people as everyone else. Tolstoy wants to help them "get back on their feet." It seems to him that it is possible to arouse the sympathy of society for these unfortunate people, that it is possible to achieve "love communication" between the rich and the poor, and the whole point is only that the rich understand the need to live "in a divine way." But at every step Tolstoy sees something else: the ruling classes commit any crimes in order to keep their power, their wealth. This is how Tolstoy imagines Moscow, where he moved with his family in 1881: “Stink, stones, luxury, poverty. Depravity. The villains who robbed the people gathered, recruited soldiers, judges to guard their orgy ‘and feast. Tolstoy perceives all this horror so sharply that his own material well-being begins to seem unacceptable to him. He refuses the usual conditions of life, is engaged in physical labor: chopping firewood, carrying water. “It is worth entering a working housing - the soul blossoms,” Tolstoy writes in his diary. And at home he does not find a place for himself. "Boring. Hard. Idleness. Fat… hard, hard. There is no light. More often than not, death beckons. Records of this kind now fill his diaries. More and more often Tolstoy speaks of the inevitability of a "workers' revolution with the horrors of destruction and murder." He considers the revolution a retribution for the oppression of the people and the atrocities of the masters, but does not believe that it is a saving way out for Russia. Where is the salvation? This question becomes more and more painful for the writer. It seems to him that evil, violence cannot be eradicated with the help of violence, that only the unity of people in the spirit of the precepts of ancient Christianity can save Russia and humanity. He proclaims the principle of "non-resistance to evil by violence." “... I now have one desire in life,” Tolstoy writes, “it’s not to upset anyone, not to offend, not to do anything unpleasant to anyone - the executioner, the usurer, but try to love them.” At the same time, the writer sees that executioners and usurers are unyielding to the preaching of love. “The need for denunciation is getting stronger and stronger,” admits Tolstoy. And he denounces furiously and angrily the inhumanity of the government, the hypocrisy of the church, the idleness and depravity of the ruling classes. In the early 1980s, a long-awaited turning point in Tolstoy's worldview came to an end. In his "Confession" (1879-1882), Tolstoy writes: "I have renounced the life of our circle." The writer condemns all his previous activities and even participation in the defense of Sevastopol. All this seems to him now a manifestation of vanity, pride, greed, which are characteristic of "masters." Tolstoy speaks of his desire to live the life of the working people, to believe in their faith. He thinks that for this you need to "renounce all the pleasures of life, work, humble yourself, endure and be merciful." In the works of the writer, the indignation and protest of the broadest masses, suffering from economic and political lawlessness, finds expression. In the article "L. N. Tolstoy and modern labor movement"(1910) V. I. Lenin says:" By birth and upbringing, Tolstoy belonged to the highest landlord nobility in Russia - he broke with all the usual views of this environment and, in his last works, attacked with passionate criticism all modern state, ecclesiastical, social, economic orders based on the enslavement of the masses, on their poverty, on the ruin of the peasants and small proprietors in general, on violence and hypocrisy, which permeate the entire modern life". Tolstoy's ideological searches did not stop until the last day of his life. But no matter how his views develop further, the defense of the interests of the many millions of peasant masses remains their basis. And when the first revolutionary storm raged in Russia, Tolstoy wrote: “In this whole revolution I am in the rank of ... a lawyer of 100 million agricultural people” (1905). The worldview of Tolstoy, who, according to Lenin, became the first "muzhik in literature", found expression in many of his works written in the 80s-90s and 900s: in stories, plays, articles, in the last of his novels - "Resurrection". “No matter how hard people tried, having gathered in one small place several hundred thousand, to disfigure the land on which they huddled, no matter how they stoned the earth so that nothing would grow on it, no matter how they cleaned off any breaking grass, no matter how they smoked coal and oil, no matter how they pruned the trees and drove out all the animals and birds - spring It was spring even in the city. The sun warmed, the grass, reviving, grew and turned green wherever they scraped it off, not only on the lawns of the boulevards, but also between the slabs of stones, and birches, poplars, bird cherry blossomed their sticky and odorous leaves, lindens puffed out bursting buds; jackdaws, sparrows and pigeons were already happily preparing their nests in the spring, and flies were buzzing along the walls, warmed by the sun. Plants, and birds, and insects, and children were cheerful. But people - big, adult people - did not stop deceiving and torturing themselves and each other. People believed that sacred and important is not this spring morning, not this beauty of the world of God, given for the benefit of all beings, - beauty, conducive to peace, harmony and love, but sacred and important is what they themselves invented in order to rule over each other. friend." This is how Leo Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection" begins. In complex sentences, extended periods, typical of Tolstoy's manner, different aspects of life are illuminated, opposed to each other. Read these lines again and say what it is: a description of a spring morning in the city or the author's thoughts about nature and society? A solemn hymn to joys is simple, natural life or an angry denunciation of people who do not live as they should?.. Here everything merged into one: epic and lyrical beginnings, description and sermon, narration of events and expression of the author's feelings. Such a fusion is characteristic of the entire work. The image of two human destinies is its basis. Prince Nekhlyudov, being a juror in court, recognizes in the defendant, accused of murder, the woman whom he seduced and abandoned many years ago. Deceived and offended by him, Katyusha Maslova ends up in a brothel and, having lost faith in people, in truth, in goodness and justice, finds herself on the verge of spiritual death. In other ways - leading a luxurious and depraved life, forgetting about truth and goodness - Nekhlyudov also goes to the final moral decline. The meeting of these people saves both of them from death, contributes to the resurrection of the truly human principle in their souls. Katyusha is innocently convicted. Nekhlyudov tries to alleviate her plight. At first, Katyusha is hostile towards him. She does not want and cannot forgive the person who killed her, she believes that the motives that prompt Nekhlyudov to take care of her fate are selfish. “You delighted in me in this life, but you want to be saved by me in the next world!” she throws angry words in Nekhlyudov's face. But as the soul is resurrected, the former feeling of love is also reborn. And Nekhlyudov is changing before Katyusha's eyes. He follows her to Siberia, wants to marry her. But she refuses this marriage, because she is afraid that he, not loving her, only out of a sense of duty decides to link his fate with hard labor. Katyusha finds a friend - the revolutionary Simonson. The renewal of the human soul is shown as a natural and beautiful process, similar to revitalization. spring nature. Resurrected love for Nekhlyudov, communication with simple, honest and kind people- all this helps Katyusha to return to the pure life that she lived in her youth. She regains faith in man, in truth, in goodness. Gradually recognizing the life of the oppressed, the destitute, he begins to distinguish good from evil and Nekhlyuds. In the first chapters of the novel, the author often draws his image in satirical tones. But as the hero of the Resurrection moves away from the privileged circle, the voice of the author and his voice draw closer, and more and more accusatory speeches sound in the mouth of Nekhlyudov. So chief characters novels go from moral decline to spiritual rebirth. Not in a single work of Tolstoy with such merciless force, with such anger and pain, with such irreconcilable hatred, did the very essence of the lawlessness, lies and meanness of class society be revealed. Tolstoy draws a soulless, blind bureaucratic machine that crushes living people. Here is one of the "engines" of this machine - the old General Baron Kriegsmuth. As a result of the execution of his instructions, given "in the name of the Sovereign Emperor", political prisoners are dying. Their death does not touch the conscience of the general, since the man in him died long ago. “Nekhlyudov listened to his hoarse old voice, looked at these ossified members, at the dead eyes from under gray eyebrows ... at this white cross, which this man was proud of, especially because he received it for an exceptionally cruel and polyphonic murder, and understood that it is useless to object, to explain to him the meaning of his words. Exposing the criminality of his contemporary society, Tolstoy often refers to one expressive detail, which, repeated many times, draws the reader's attention to the very essence of the social phenomenon. Such is the image of the “bloodless child in a patchwork skufe” that Nekhlyudov sees in the countryside. “This child kept smiling strangely all over his old face and kept moving his tensely twisted thumbs. A thoughtful artist seeks to understand those who have declared open war on a vicious society, who go to hard labor for their beliefs. The author ranks the revolutionaries among the people who "stand morally above the average level of society", calls them the best people. The revolutionaries arouse Nekhlyudov's cordial disposition, and according to Katyusha, "such wonderful people ... she not only did not know, but could not even imagine." “She very easily and without effort understood the motives that guided these people, and, as a person from the people, she fully sympathized with them. She understood that these people were going for the people, against the masters; and the fact that these people themselves were masters and sacrificed their advantages, freedom and life for the people, made her especially value these people and admire them. In the assessment of the revolutionaries, given from the point of view of Katyusha, it is not difficult to catch the author's attitude towards them. The images of Maria Pavlovna, Kryltsov, Simonson are charming. The only exception is Novodvor-ditch, who claims to be the leader, treats the people with contempt and is confident in his infallibility. This man brought into the revolutionary milieu that reverence for form, for dead dogmas to the detriment of the interests of living people, which reigned in bureaucratic circles. But it is not Novodvorov who determines the moral character of the revolutionaries. Despite deep ideological differences with them, Tolstoy could not help but appreciate their moral value. However, Tolstoy still rejects the very principle of the violent overthrow of the rotten social order. In Resurrection, not only the strength of the great realist, but also the tragic contradictions of his passionate search, were reflected. At the end of the novel, Nekhlyudov comes to a bitter conclusion: “All that terrible evil that he saw and learned during this time ... all this evil ... triumphed, reigned, and there was no way not only to defeat him, but even to understand how to defeat him " . The conclusion that Nekhlyudov finds unexpectedly for the reader and for himself after everything he has seen and experienced does not follow from the pictures of life that passed before his eyes. This way out was suggested by the book that ended up in the hands of Nekhlyudov - the Gospel. He comes to the conclusion that "the only and indisputable means of salvation from that terrible evil from which people suffer is to admit oneself always guilty before God and therefore incapable of either punishing or correcting other people." The answer to the question of how to destroy all the horror that Nekhlyudov saw turns out to be simple: “Forgive forever, everyone, forgive an infinite number of times, because there are no people who would not be guilty themselves ...” Whom to forgive? Baron Kriegsmuth? Are the victims as guilty as the executioners? And did humility ever save the oppressed? "Make the whole world listen!" He said about Tolstoy: “For 60 years he walked around Russia, looked everywhere; to the village, to the village school, to the Vyazemsky Lavra and abroad, to prisons, stages, to the cabinets of ministers, to the office of governors, to huts, to inns and to the living rooms of aristocratic ladies. For 60 years, a stern and truthful voice sounded, denouncing everyone and everything; he told us about almost as much as the rest of our literature ... Tolstoy is deeply national, he embodies in his soul with amazing fullness all the features of the complex Russian psyche ... Tolstoy is a whole world. A deeply truthful person, he is also valuable to us because his works of art, written with terrible, almost miraculous power - all his novels and stories - fundamentally deny his religious philosophy ... This man did a truly great job: he gave a summary of what he had experienced over a century, and gave it with amazing truthfulness, strength and beauty. Without knowing Tolstoy, you cannot consider yourself knowing your country, you cannot consider yourself a cultured person. Health 1 0 0 If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl+Enter. 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