Tolstoy (1828–1910) Orphan at 9 Real count War and Peace Anna Karenina 13 children School for peasant children Return to simpler Christianity Pacifist and anarchist A gambler, womanizer, and aristocrat, Count Leo Tolstoy was also a vegetarian, pacifist, anarchist, and a passionate advocate for the Russian peasantry. He was orphaned at age nine, spending his life on the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the company of close family members and his serfs. He was an expert on marriage and considered a moral and religious sage, even though he struggled with a difficult marriage and was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. Tolstoy’s statement, “Blame me and not the path I tread,” reflects his intense, lifelong struggle to find the best way to live in the world—how to respond to the pressures of guilt and pleasure, authority and money, sex and war. He later opened a school for peasant children at the family estate, which called for education reform based on experience rather than inundating children with information. The image is a photograph of Tolstoy in 1856.

Crimean War In 1851 Tolstoy followed his older brother Nikolay, a soldier, to the mountains of the Caucasus, where the Russian army was protecting the hotly contested boundary between Russia and the Ottoman and Persian empires. Here he began publishing his work; he joined the army, where he witnessed the devastation, incompetence, and confusion of war between Russia and Britain in Crimea. The image is a panoramic painting of the siege of Sevastopol (1904) by Franz Roubaud.

Yasnaya Polyana Leo Tolstoy’s critique of the upper classes, represented by Ivan Ilyich, his family, and acquaintances, is clear as these groups focus on material desires and ignore or are indifferent to death, while the peasant Gerasim is the only character to openly accept Ilyich’s impending death. What makes the Soviet situation especially interesting is that while Tolstoy’s class critique in the story fits communist critiques of the upper classes, Tolstoy’s answer to the meaningless life of upper-class Russians was a spiritual answer. To fit Tolstoy to Soviet-era atheism, the class critique of The Death of Ivan Ilyich had to be emphasized, while downplaying Tolstoy’s use of a class critique in order to set the stage for his Christian discussion of death. The image is a photograph of Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy estate on which Tolstoy later founded an experimental school for peasant children based on an education of experience rather than book knowledge.

Freudian Parallels Sigmund Freud claims in Mourning and Melancholia and elsewhere that this denial of death is shared by all humanity. Ivan Ilyich struggles to recognize his own death is a psychological struggle that all humanity endures, often abandoning the struggle to live in complete denial. Sigmund Freud claims in Mourning and Melancholia and elsewhere that this denial of death is shared by all humanity. Ilyich’s struggle to recognize his own death is a psychological struggle that all humanity endures, often abandoning the struggle to live in complete denial. The cause of Ilyich’s eventual death is itself an example of this: he is focused on the trivial task of hanging curtains when he hurts himself, having been too focused on a trifling matter to notice the danger in which he put himself. Even as he dies, Ilyich struggles to fully recognize his own approaching death.