Leo Tolstoy - Profiled

Tolstoy died a 100 years ago this month.

From a piece in the Atlantic...

One of the surprises of working at a 153-year-old magazine is opening our archives and stumbling across a piece like this profile of Leo Tolstoy. The Russian author died 100 years ago, on November 7, 1910, and toward the end of his life, an American writer named Isabel Hapgood visited him at his country estate. In her Atlantic profile, she describes him as a rugged man coming home to greet his guests after a day in the fields:

The count, who had been mowing, appeared at dinner in a grayish blouse and trousers and a soft white linen cap. He looked even more weather-beaten in complexion than he had in Moscow during the winter, if that were possible. His broad shoulders seemed to preserve in their enhanced stoop a memory of recent toil. His manner, a combination of gentle simplicity, awkward half-conquered consciousness, and half-discarded polish, was as cordial as ever. His piercing gray-green-blue eyes had lost none of their almost saturnine and withal melancholy expression.

These words bring to mind scenes from Anna Karenina—not of the doomed heroine and her lover, but of the character called Levin. It's never been a secret that Levin is a stand-in for Tolstoy himself—like Tolstoy, Levin is ambivalent about his noble birth, and a secondary plot follows Levin's efforts to manage his estate and marriage in ways that are both principled and human.

According to Hapgood, Tolstoy was still facing these struggles at the age of 63. We see him devoting his later years to an enlightened sort of nobility—opening schools and hospitals, giving away his family's wealth, and toiling alongside his workers in the hayfields on blazing summer days. When he's not engaged in manual labor, Tolstoy sits in his library reading about the latest ideologies. "I imagine that the first copies of every book, pamphlet, and journal on any hobby or 'ism,' especially from America, find their way to the address of Count Tolstóy," Hapgood writes. "He showed me some very wild products of the human brain."