Chapter 38 - Biographies

Summary

Two problems confront the biographer of Tolstoy. First, his life lacks the catastrophic coercive outer events and bodily illness that drive the more persecuted biographical plots of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. The most celebrated events in the life of the healthy, wealthy, highborn Tolstoy were not imposed on him from outside but resulted from his own freely offered verbal acts, which increasingly became condemnations of the practices and values of his social class. Second, Tolstoy wrote more words about himself than any outside person could ever hope to do. These autobiographical statements condemn more often than they confirm. How does the biographer choose among these self-lacerating, self-cancelling words? This chapter survey two types of biography: the long comprehensive account and the brief glimpse (Short Life). Discussed as exemplary within the first type are Aylmer Maude (the Boswell model who lives alongside his subject), Henri Troyat (the biographer as novelist), and Rosamund Bartlett (the synoptic view of Tolstoy as world phenomenon). This is followed by two examples of the “brief glimpse” genre: Liza Knapp’s Leo Tolstoy: A Very Short Introduction (2019), and Anthony Briggs’s controversial – even scandalous – biography in the series Brief Lives (2010). Finally, tribute is paid Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, the writer’s wife and closest, least naïve chronicler.