The daughters doted on the father, the sons stuck with the mother - Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy: A Russian Life, by Rosamund Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

I enjoyed Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Leo Tolstoy for the large picture she paints of Russian life and history, and Tolstoy's place in that picture. As a reader, I of course knew about Tolstoy's importance as a novelist -- War and Peace and Anna Karenina are enough to keep his name alive for many future generations -- but I did not know the impact Tolstoy had as a political and spiritual thinker. Tolstoy societies and communes, pacifist movements, vegetarianism, opposition to despotism, an inspiration to Gandhi, a threat to the church and the Czarist government -- Bartlett wonderfully describes all of these currents around this great, irascible, and conflicted man.

I sometimes felt that Tolstoy himself seemed a bit obscured in the book. There are surprisingly few quotations from Tolstoy's letters, diaries, essays or fictional works -- surprising for a man who documented so much of his life. We briefly and abruptly read about events in his life -- of Tolstoy holding a dying brother in his arms, of Tolstoy angry with his wife Sonya (which he frequently was), of Tolstoy as a shrewd businessman negotiating with publishers for his work -- but we don't see enough Tolstoy in his own words or in his day to day life. It's minor criticism to what I think is otherwise a wonderful book.

Tolstoy's importance as a foundational figure in the growing Russian intellectual opposition to the czars, and even as an inspiration to the Marxists and Socialists came as a revelation to me. Not that he was a revolutionary (Bartlett makes pains to show that he was not, and he did not advocate the overthrow of the czarist government), but his voluminous writings on peasant education, the immorality of the caste system, the immorality of war and nationalistic fervor, the corruption of the capital system, all of it made him a patron saint to the Russian opposition.

Poor Sofya Bers, his wife. Bartlett sympathetically depicts her struggle to run a huge household and act as secretary to a writer who became a semi-religious saint of biblical proportions. (In fact, Sofya almost has as much flesh and blood in this book as Tolstoy himself.) Leo wanted to relinquish his wealth, give up his copyrights, become a wandering prophet, spend his time in religious and philosophical discussion. Tolstoy was stern and endlessly demanding. How could a practical woman like Sonya have put up with him all those years? And how could he with her?

Interesting that the Tolstoy daughters revered and doted on their difficult saintly father, while the sons tended to rebel against him and sided with their mother.