The body of work

Tolstoy wrote novels, short stories and plays. As a body of work they demonstrate extraordinary powers of observation, an exacting ability to recreate life in words and superb skill as a storyteller. His work is a window into his life and into Russia in the 1800s, and into the way people everywhere think and feel and the complexity of the human mind.

Several of his key characters are very like Tolstoy in their aspirations and experience, including Nicholas Irtenev who dreams of living among the common people in Childhood, Dimitry Olenin who loves the simple life depicted in The Cossacks but doesn’t quite fit in, Pierre Bezukhov who dreams of becoming a force for reform in War and Peace, Constantine Levin who loves his estate in Anna Karenina and Dimitry Neklyudov who seduces a peasant in Resurrection.

Tolstoy changes his mind several times about whether literature should be about art or politics. At first he asserts there is no place for propaganda in fiction: “However important a political literature may be, a literature that reflects the passing problems of society, and however necessary to national progress, there is still another type of literature that reflects the eternal necessities of all mankind, the dearest and deepest imaginings of a whole race, a literature that is accessible to all and to every age, one without which no people has been able to grow powerful and fertile” (p200, Tolstoy, Troyat).

When Alexander II becomes Tsar in 1855 discussions on this topic grow loud because he is seen as a reformist: many of Tolstoy’s literary contemporaries and the educated public want serious stories that deal with Russia’s social concerns. When Tolstoy joins more than 100 other writers to support the Tsar’s abolition of serfdom, he says he feels nauseated by the close relationship between artists and social action. In the late 1890s, however, he forcefully argues the opposite in his essay What is Art?

Tolstoy’s habit is to work on more than one story at a time and his body of work is immense, especially considering the size of his two best-known novels. At the time of his death his wife Sophia is working on a Complete Works in 28 volumes, and his loyal disciple Vladimir Chertkov is toiling over The Collected Thoughts of L N Tolstoy, which includes literature, essays, diaries and correspondence. Chertkov was later involved in the Soviet Government’s Complete Works, which is published after his death and stretches to 90 volumes.

The diversity of his work is also substantial, particularly because his focus shifted towards philosophy and the writing of Essays after he entered his fifth decade. The works listed below are all fictional and are listed in the order they were first published or publicly performed, rather than written. Some first appeared as to-be-continued sections in periodicals, as signified by dates that span several years. It is not a comprehensive list.

Childhood, 1852, Boyhood, 1854, Youth, 1857
The Raid, 1853, The Wood-Felling, 1855, Sevastopol Sketches, 1855, 1856
The Snowstorm, 1856, Lucerne, 1857, A Landlord’s Morning, 1857, Three Deaths, 1859, Family Happiness, 1859, Polikushka, 1963.
The Cossacks, 1963
War and Peace, 1865-1869
Anna Karenina, 1873-1878
The Infected Family, 1863, The Fruits of Enlightenment 1890, The Power of Darkness 1895 (plays)
Strider, 1985
The Death of Ivan Ilich, 1886, Master and Man 1895
The Kreutzer Sonata, 1990
Resurrection, 1899
Hadji Murad, 1912

Literary influences