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How Much Land Does A Man Need? , " by Leo Tolstoy was influenced by his life and times. Leo Tolstoy encountered many things throughout his life that influenced his works. His life itself influenced him, along with poverty, greed and peasant days in 19 th century Russia. Tolstoy's eventful life impacted his works. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born into a family of aristocratic landowners in 1828 at the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, a place south of Moscow. His parents died in the 1930 s when he was very young so his aunts raised him with an upper middle class lifestyle.
His aunts were very important to him and when they died, he made them live on forever as characters in his stories (Alexander 16). While his aunts were still alive, they hired tutors to teach him out of Tolstoy's home (Tolstoi). After a few years of wandering about Russia, he recommenced his studies at sixteen years old at Kazan' University to study law and oriental language but preferred to educate himself independently and in 1847, he gave up his studies without finishing his degree (Treat 28). His next fifteen years were very unsettled. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana to manage the family estate, with the purpose to improve himself intellectually, morally, and physically. After less than two years, though, he abandoned rural life for the pleasures of Moscow.
In 1851, Tolstoy traveled to the Caucasus, a region then part of southern Russia, where his brother was serving in the army. He enlisted as a volunteer, serving with distinction in the Crimean War from 1853 - 1856 (Magill 382). Tolstoy started his literary career in the 1850 s during his army service. His genre of work includes novels, short stories, fiction, plays, nonfiction and letters. His first literary work was a trilogy; each section of the trilogy including a different part of growing up: Childhood, written in 1852, noted for a lyrical and charming picture of the innocence and joy of life through a child's eyes; Boyhood, written in 1854; and Youth, written in 1857. This trilogy focuses on the psychological and moral development of the hero from age ten to his late teens (Minutes).
A series of short stories followed, and when he left the military in 1856, he was acknowledged as a rising new talent in literature. Experiences in the Crimean War provided the material fir his three "Sebastopol Tales, " which pay tribute to the common soldier while forcefully condemning war (Note 43). Another short novel, "The Cossacks, " grew out of Tolstoy's service in the Caucasus. The hero of the book, Levin, decides to escape the artificiality of Moscow society to attempt a more natural life among the Cossacks in a Caucasian village.
He finds that he cannot abandon his civilized values, and the Cossacks never accept him (Encarta). Even in his first work, like most of his others, it was apparent to see the psychological realism and the "breadth of their approach" that Tolstoy was most praised for, although some authors, including E. M. Forester and Henry James felt that Tolstoy's novels lacked elegant form (Magill 382). Tolstoy was never comfortable in the literary world, however, and in 1859, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana to manage his estate, to set up a school for peasant children, and to write about his progressive theories of education. In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Moscow physician.
Married life at Yasnaya Polyana, a growing, happy family, and absorption in creating his finest literary work brought him stability for the next fifteen years (Pearlman 24). War and Peace, another novel of Tolstoy, tells the story of the restless, questing Pierre Bezukhov and two upper-class families, the Belkonskys and the Rostovs, in the years leading up to and following French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Russia. The book depicts the everyday lives of four major characters that are also caught up in momentous historical events; they face similar challenges but respond in different ways. Each seeks to find meaning in his or her life: Pierre and the engaging heroine, Natasha Rostov, eventually find fulfillment in the family; Natasha's brother, Nikolai, also finds it in family and in running his estate; the doubting intellectual Andrei Bolkonsky finds it only on his deathbed, in withdrawing from life altogether.
Tolstoy reveals both the inner and the outer lives of these characters, as well as more than 500 other characters, historical and fictional, through a combination of sharp physical detail and close psychological analysis. The novel also includes an extended essay treating the question of what moves history. Here, Tolstoy deflates the notion that history is made by great men such as Napoleon and argues that historical events can be understood only through the actions of extremely large numbers of ordinary people living their daily lives. After a break of a few years, during which he turned again to educating peasant children, Tolstoy returned to literature with his second masterpiece, Anna Karenina, written between 1875 and 1877. While not as great as War and Peace, the novel still paints a broad and detailed picture of all levels of Russian life in the 1870 s. Tolstoy examines three marriages: that of the heroine, Anna, who is married to the dry public servant Karenina and who has a passionate affair with a young army officer named Vronsky; the relatively happy and stable marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatsky; and the shaky but enduring marriage of Anna's brother, Still, and Kitty's sister Dolly.
The novel is elaborately structured, with many subtle comparisons and contrasts among the three marriages. It ends darkly. Excluded from a deceitful society that cannot tolerate her honest and open expression of love for Vronsky, torn by guilt over her adulterous affair and the forced abandonment of her son, Anna takes her own life. Even Levin, having begun a family with the woman he loves, is beset by doubts about the meaning of his life. While working on the later parts of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy began experiencing bouts of depression, which at times were so severe that he considered suicide. He was tormented by the need to find a meaning for his life that would not be extinguished by his death.
His work "A Confession" describes this spiritual struggle and the solution he found: to practice what he saw as the essence of Christianity -- that is, universal love and passive resistance to evil in the form of violence. Tolstoy's literature reflected his ideas about how people should go about their way of life. In Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does A Man Need? , " he tells the story of a plain farmer who is done in by his own greed. In the short story, the Bashkir chief tells Pahom that he can have all of the land he can walk upon if he can cover it in one day. The chief of the Bashkirs warns Pahom that he must return before sundown, or he will involuntarily give up the land that he walked and the money he gave for the land. Pahom's mind ponders all the wealth he can accumulate just by walking.
Pahom realizes, too late, though, that he should not have been so greedy (Tolstoy). In this literary masterpiece, Tolstoy uses Pahom's quest to warn the reader that reaching for too...
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Research essay sample on War And Peace Tells The Story
