| Term Paper Title | I Am Tolstoy, But Not A Tolstoyian |
| # of Words | 450 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 1.8 |
I am Tolstoy, but not a Tolstoyian
In 1828, somewhere in the countryside north of Moscow,
Leo Tolstoy was born into the Russian nobility. Count
Tolstoy, although acquainted with the finer things that life
had to offer, new that the Romantic view of the world was
false early in his life. His mother left this world when he was
two, and his father undoubtedly told horrific stories of the
chaotic Napoleonic Wars. This, coupled with the
consecutive deaths of not only his father, but his favorite
aunts and grandmother, all before his twenty-first birthday,
a three year stint in the military during the Crimean war, and
the works of masters such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Hegel,
Darwin, Dickens, Gogol, and the New Testament
contributed to the literary genius which is Tolstoy.
As a realist, Tolstoy was committed to truthfully
representing reality in literature. As a founder of a
socio-religious movement, aptly named Tolstoyism, his goal
was to enlighten the masses. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a
prime example of the merger of these two ideals. At first
glance this is a simple tale of a "most simple and most
ordinary and therefore most terrible" man’s life and death
(1208). But upon closer scrutiny, we see that this is a
stylized account of the Count’s own life.
Much like Ivan, the Count married a younger wife, not so
much out of love, as out of convenience. After a few years
of marital bliss, problems a...Read entire document
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