Page 79 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Elective English—III

Notes By the turn of the century, Tolstoy was universally loved and respected by all classes of people
except for the very wealthy and powerful. In part to mediate some of his influence, the Russian
Church (Greek Orthodox) excommunicated him in March 1901. He was also denounced by the
state as an anarchist in 1891, and he increasingly had to publish his works abroad because of
censorship. These measures failed to lessen Tolstoy’s popularity with the working class - on the
day after the Church’s excommunication announcement, students and workers paraded in public
squares and accosted Tolstoy with such support and sympathy that he was forced to run back
into his house.
Though his health began to fail in 1901, Tolstoy continued his writing and his public work until
the end of his life. In his final years, he became more fixed on spiritual ideas and moral perfection.
Desiring complete freedom from social responsibilities, he left his wife on November 10, 1910
in order to live in a hut in the woods and concentrate on spiritual matters. It was during this final
journey that he died, on November 21, 1910, in a village near the Shamardin Convent.
Appropriately, peasants brought his body to Yasnaya Polyana.
All three stages of Tolstoy’s life and writings (pre-conversion, conversion, effects of conversion)
reflect the single quest of his career: to find the ultimate truth of human existence. After finding
this truth, his life was a series of struggles to practice his preaching. He became a public figure
as both a sage and an artist during his lifetime and Yasnaya Polyana became a mecca for a never-
ceasing stream of pilgrims. The intensity and heroic scale of his life have been preserved for us
from the memoirs of friends and family and wisdom seeking visitors. Though Tolstoy expressed
his philosophy and theory of history with the same thoroughness and lucidity he devoted to his
novels, he is known today chiefly for his important contributions to literature. Although his
artistic influence is wide and still pervasive, few writers have achieved the personal stature with
which to emulate his epic style.

Did u know? Director Michael Hoffman with Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen
Mirren as Sofya Tolstoya made a 2009 film about Tolstoy’s final year, The Last Station,
based on the novel by Jay Parini. Both performers were nominated for Oscars for their
roles.

6.2 Writing Style

Tolstoy used ordinary events and characters to examine war, religion, feminism, and other
topics. He was convinced that philosophical principles could only be understood in their concrete
expression in history. All of his work is characterized by uncomplicated style, careful construction,
and deep insight into human nature. His chapters are short, and he paid much attention to the
details of everyday life. Tolstoy also refused to recognize the conventional climaxes of narrative -
War and Peace begins in the middle of a conversation and ends in the first epilogue in the
middle of a sentence.
Gary R. Jahn believes that in Tolstoy’s work, the simple sentence is the norm for the narrative.
Besides being comparatively short, sentences are often elliptical (=syntactically deponent in
some respect, usually missing one of the normal lead elements, a subject or a verb). In longer
sentences, there is a strong tendency toward a simple linking of independent clauses rather than
a resort to subordinate constructions. There is a strong tendency toward the inversion of the
standard order of elements within clauses – mutatis mutandis, the standard order of sentence
elements in Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) is subjectverbobject, while these stories
show a frequent displacement of the subject. The stories frequently display lexical material and
syntactic patterns, which are characteristic of popular speech “regional”. Related to item five,
there is the use of directly allusive language material (quotations from the Bible, interpolation

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