Tolstoy is regarded amongst the greatest of novelists with the immense achievement of two epic masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy’s first masterpiece was published in parts in the periodical The Russian Messenger, starting in 1865 and running for the next four years. Despite its title it can be regarded as a comedy with the confused characters being Pierre, Nikolai, Natasha and Maria who after many events and altercations are finally paired up appropriately. The dark side of the comedy is the setting which of course is the French invasion of Russian led by Napoleon, sixty years before the period of writing.
One of the few issues showing something other than Tolstoy’s portrait comes to us from his home country in a 1956 Writers set and depicts characters from War and Peace. On the right of stamp we see four Russian officers in camp.
Tolstoy’s genius comes in his graphic realism which he uses not only in depicting the horrors of war, but also in writing about personal relationships. It is almost as if Tolstoy was anticipating the coming of film, such is ability to construct panorama in the reader’s eye. He was one the first writers to adopt the position of omniscient narrator in crafting a written-through narrative: many “epistolary” novels before (and after) consisted entirely of connected letters, newspaper articles and reports.
Tolstoy’s second great work arguably the greatest novel ever written, followed ten years later and if War and Peace is unclassifiable in genre because of its scope, there is no doubt that Anna Karenina is a tragedy.
Tolstoy’s inspiration for the heroine is said to have been Maria, daughter of Alexander Pushkin whom Tolstoy met at a dinner party and whose serene elegance had impressed him so much.
The novel, published in The Russian Messenger in parts over four years from 1873, tells two completely different but interwoven stories, those of “Kostya” Levin, a restless but shy aristocrat and of Anna. Levin is the childhood friend of Prince Oblonsky aka “Stiva”, who is having an affair with his children’s governess which has just been discovered by his wife “Dolly”. Levin is coming to Moscow to propose to “Kitty”, “Dolly”’s youngest sister. Anna Karenina is “Stiva”’s married sister and is coming on a previously arranged and now potentially awkward visit, then she meets her nemesis in the rakish Count Alexei Vronsky. The novel has inspired the “Anna Karenina Principle” based on the quotation, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.
Born into considerable wealth on an estate at Yasnaya Polyana (meaning Clear Glade) in Tula province to the south of Moscow, (shown in the background of this 40k 1960 issue) Tolstoy whose full name was Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was brought up by relatives on the death of his parents when he was only nine. Having being schooled by tutors until he was 16 he then entered Kazan University to study languages and law and became very interested in the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau, much admired by the Russians but left without a degree. By this time he was already aware of the widespread poverty brought about by the Russian feudal system, but his early attempts to improve the lot of some of the peasants on his estate came to nothing and, curiously, he slid easily into the luxuries and temptations of high society in Moscow, which was open to him because of his status. His experiences here were to provide a rich quarry for his later writing.
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