Literary influences

During his teenage years Tolstoy becomes a big fan of the French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly of his Emile and The Confessions. He is told by family members that his mother also admired Rousseau. He finds many authors and philosophers that impress before seriously embarking on his own writing. He doesn’t just read them but also writes commentaries on what they are writing. Writers of interest include the Englishmen Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and George Sand from France, Goethe from Germany, and prominent Russian men of letters such as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Lermontov. He knew some of these Russian works by heart. At one stage he sets out to translate Stern’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) into Russian to improve his English and, late in life, says that Dickens’s David Copperfield is his favourite book. Other names mentioned by Tolstoy’s biographers include Friedrich Schiller and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Reading the work of other great writers stimulates his own creative process. In 1878, his wife writes in her diary: “I happen to know that when Lyovochka turns to English novels he is about to start writing himself.” Sometimes those novels are authored by Dickens, whose portrait hung in Tolstoy’s study at Yasnaya Polyana.

As he matures and travels after his military experience, Tolstoy’s reading broadenes. Instead of just literature he reads religious, scientific, social and historical works, as well as many texts about education. One of his favourites is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s What is Property? in which the author argues that private property is theft, that government of man by man is oppression, and that the union of order and anarchy is the highest form of society. One of the books Tolstoy reads during the writing of War and Peace is French writer Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. He is also under the influence of Homer’s two epic poems Iliad and Odyssey.

After he finishes War and Peace he fully embraces philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenauer. At other times in his life he expresses his admiration for Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Anatole France, Emile Zola and, for his plays, Moliere. He devours Confucius in his early 70s. In the weeks just before he dies he is reading Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, the second volume of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Une Vie by Guy de Maupassant.

Tolstoy is also highly influenced by his wife Sophia, who has a huge role in the creation of War and Peace and Anna Karenina and governs his domestic life, as well as by his key disciple, Vladimir Chertkov, who governs his professional life following the publication of his best-known books. If Chertkov had not been so influential, Tolstoy would probably have written more fiction, which would have pleased Sophia hugely.