The life of Leo Tolstoy. Read experience

Leo Tolstoy has long become a hallmark of Russian culture, but in modern Russia its perception is often blurred by stereotypes coming from the Soviet tradition-by school teaching, the desire to oppose the fat-artist to the Tolstoy-Learn. Meanwhile, it is today that Tolstoy is amazingly relevant: the idea of ​​non -violent resistance, vegetarianism, downshifting, the requirement of refusing military service, the struggle to preserve nature, attitude to love and sexuality? Everything that seemed like his strangeness becomes the world intellectual mainstream. The new brief biography of the great writer traces the main lines of his fate and creativity. Tolstoy’s artistic and philosophical heritage is considered here along with military experience, peasant labor and family tragedy. Such an "integrative" approach allows us to talk about him outside the arguments of the "contradictions that have lost their soreness and more clearly see the unique sequence and integrity of his life path. Andrei Zorin is a literature historian, a professor at the University of Oxford and MVSHSEN