Slavic Literature. Tolstoy’s Childhood and Narrative Term Paper

Isaak Babel once said about Tolstoy: “if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Lev Nikolayevich was a Russian author, essayist, dramatist, and philosopher as well as a pacifist Christian anarchist and educational reformer. Count Leo Tolstoy was baptized Orthodox into the family of privileged and wealthy in the Czarist Russia in the year 1828. Born on 28th August 1828, into a long line of Russian nobility, he was the fourth amongst the five children of his parents. Tolstoy’s mother Countess Maria Volkonsky died while giving birth to his sister Mariya in 1830. His father was Count Nicolay Ilyich Tolstoy. Leo was the most influential member of his family. (Tolstoy, 2000-2008).

His Works

In the words of Virginia Wolf, “Tolstoy is the greatest of all novelists.” Tolstoy is regarded as the greatest novelist of all fiction writers particularly so for his masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction for their scope, breadth, and closeness to reality in the depiction of 19th century Russia and the life which he lived therein. Tolstoy was a moral philosopher and more so notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his works like The Kingdom of God is Within You, which later influenced many world leaders.

Mathew Arnold commented on Tolstoy’s works and called them not a work of art but a piece of life. At about 50, Tolstoy experienced a spiritual crisis. It was at this point that he was so agonized about discovering life’s meaning that he seriously contemplated ending his life. He relates the story of his spiritual crisis in his work, A Confession.

Tolstoy’s Childhood

Excerpt from Childhood

“Do in the afterlife the freshness and life heartedness, the craving for love and strength of faith, ever return which we experience in our childhood’s years? What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues – innocent gaiety and boundless yearning for affection – are our sole objects of pursuit?” From this excerpt, one can visualize how deeply Tolstoy would have understood and explained childhood. It is a known fact that Tolstoy had a grief-filled childhood and so this would have been an emotional book to its readers because firstly everyone could have identified with the book and they could also sympathize with the sorrow of the writer.

Childhood, Tolstoy’s first work, published in 1852, was perhaps the most acclaimed first book by any author. This short novel was mostly noted for its narrative voice of the child protagonist, and its originality. Tolstoy himself has remarked about it. “When I wrote ‘childhood’, it seemed that no one before me had so felt and depicted all the charm and poetry of childhood.” (Simmons). The book was published when Tolstoy was twenty-three. It caught the immediate attention of noted Russian writers and heralded the young Tolstoy as a major figure in Russian letters. ‘Childhood’ is an expressionist exploration of the internal turmoil in the life of a young boy, Nikolenka.

The book describes the major physiological decisions that all boys experience during boyhood. It was a new form in Russian writing and it resorted to mixing facts with fiction. It was emotional to render the moods and reactions of the narrator.

Many consider ‘Childhood’ to be in line with Pushkin’s classical Russian realism, but it still stands out distinctly because of how Tolstoy blends autobiography with elements of fiction. Though it is autobiographical, he integrates imaginativeness by making appropriate changes in his life’s story. An example is the father character in the novel who is addicted to gambling and shares no common traits with Tolstoy’s father. Similarly, Tolstoy’s mother dies before he turns two, yet he has used his unique narrative voice to emulate his feelings for her when he recalls her death.

Another important characteristic of Tolstoy’s narrative voice is that his writing reflects the integrity and depth of personal feelings and expressions. He writes with such a conviction that the readers are compelled to follow his thought process and go along with the characters, feeling what they are feeling. This becomes possible for Tolstoy because he emphasizes the emotional and psychological reasons why his character do what they do rather than basing the narrative on incidents.

In his narrative style, the significance of events gets diluted and the prominence of emotion, which he gleaned from his own experience, assumes importance. The strength of narrative voice, which Tolstoy employs as an effective literary device in telling the story of ‘Childhood’, is a singular element that lifts the novel to its heights as the foremost in the annals of Russian literature. More so, when it comes to the matter of its being the first work from a novice writer winning such accolades from masters of Russian letters like Dostoevsky, one can understand the influence it truly holds in the world of literature. To be so effective, a writer necessarily needs to have the treasure of experience coupled with the gift of an original voice.

The uniqueness of Tolstoy’s narrative voice stems from his unique personal experiences as a child, and he had a peculiar way of capturing the charm and elegance of childhood experiences in his writing. The psychological details and emphasis on emotions further accentuate his narrative voice and elevate it on a level other writers can not imagine reaching. It becomes obvious that the uniqueness of personal experiences, blended with the ability to integrate fictional elements into an autobiographical account, is what makes Tolstoy’s narrative voice so effective and convincing.

Works Cited

Tolstoy, Leo. Leo Tolstoy. Literature Network. 2000-2008. Web.

Tolstoy, Leo., and Hogarth, C. J. Childhood (English Trans). LibriVox. 2008. Web.

Simmons, Ernest. Introduction to Tolstoy’s Writings: Literary Beginnings. Web.