Tolstoy Inspiration For TodayBy Professor Andy Kaufman
Tolstoy’s Infectious Love of Life
“The goal of the artist is not to decide a question indisputably, but to inspire people to love life in its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.”
Never stop living! Never stop learning! Never stop loving! That is one of the overarching messages of Tolstoy’s own life. Unfortunately we sometimes have this image of Tolstoy as a “serious Russian writer,” who wrote imposing novels and who preached from on high about serious matters of life and death. But this was only one aspect of Tolstoy’s personality. Another dominant aspect, which is less well known in the West, is that Tolstoy was a vibrant, earthy man who had an insatiable love of life. Tolstoy’s love of children is legendary. He famously spent hours at a time telling his grandchildren fantastic tales about exotic people, animals, and even vegetables. Tolstoy loved nature, too. All of those wonderful scenes in Anna Karenina, in which Levin is mowing in the fields and taking in the thrill of nature, come right out of Tolstoy’s own personal experience.
Tolstoy also had a dark side. He liked loose women. He liked gambling. And he loved to party a little too much, especially in his youth. When you go today to Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate where Tolstoy lived most of his life and wrote his novels, you see a big open space where there is supposed to be a house, the house that Tolstoy was born in. That house is no longer there. There is just a stone, indicating that the house was sold in order to pay off a 3000-ruble gambling bet Tolstoy had incurred when he was a young man. “I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget about my existence,” Tolstoy wrote in his diary the day that happened. He was twenty seven.
In fact, if you read through all of Tolstoy’s diaries from when he was in his twenties, you get a charmingly humorous portrait of a man, a real man, who lived life to the hilt, who made mistakes, and who constantly struggled with his own passions. Tolstoy even tried to control himself by resuming his teenage practice of writing down daily rules of conduct and then grading himself the next day. Apparently, his grades were low: “It’s absurd that having started writing rules at fifteen I should still be writing them at thirty, without having trusted in, or followed a single one,” Tolstoy wrote.
Tolstoy was a man who lived life to the fullest. It is because of this passion for life, and the excesses and the mistakes that went along with it, that he understood life. He was not writing about people and about the world from up in an ivory tower. He was writing about them from down here, where all of us live and struggle every day. Tolstoy appreciated characters, such as Levin, who are out there living life, experiencing it, making mistakes, getting hurt, picking themselves up, and doing it all over again. He much preferred that to characters, such as Karenin, who hide from life and from themselves in their little self-protective bubbles.
If there is any lesson to be learned from Tolstoy’s life, it is that you must have the courage to take emotional risks. You must make yourself vulnerable to all of the joys and the sadness and the mystery life has to offer. Only that way can you truly appreciate life. This kind of healthy risk-taking mentality was the basis of Tolstoy's own life. And it is the reason his writing still appears so rich and so real to us today.
“Error is the force that welds human beings together.”
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