Tolstoy was a most conscientious and exacting literary artist. Before writing War and Peace, he made careful historical studies; it is his longest and most ambitious work, and might be termed a prose epic rather than a novel.
Tolstoy also planned a novel on the period of Peter the Great, but the more he studied this subject the less he liked it; he found the whole epoch unsympathetic, and declared that Peter's so-called reforms were not really intended for the good of the people, but mainly for his own personal profit, and that what he really desired was freedom for a life of immorality.
Tolstoy's next great novel, Anna Karénina, was based on an event which had occurred in real life—the suicide of a young lady who, owing to an unhappy love affair, flung herself before a train. Tolstoy chose as a motto for his book the biblical saying: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," the fundamental idea being that people have no right to judge others, and that for human relations there is but one law—the law of mercy. Among all Tolstoy's critics Dostoïevsky appears to have been the only one who understood him in this sense; most readers seem to have interpreted the motto in the narrowest possible way as meaning the punishment of Anna for her breach of the marriage vow.
During all this period of literary activity Tolstoy was greatly aided by his wife; she served as his amanuensis, she alone being able to interpret his crabbed and difficult handwriting with its endless corrections, and one of her relatives records that she seven times re-copied the enormous MS. of War and Peace.
It was, as he himself tells us, about his fiftieth year that a great change came over Tolstoy. His life had been one of brilliant success; he had achieved great distinction, he had an excellent property, a congenial wife, a happy family, but he became profoundly dissatisfied. Merejkovsky, the most severe of Tolstoy's critics, ascribes this condition mainly to the ebb of vitality natural at his age, and considers it to be, in its origin, essentially physical and egoistic; but Merejkovsky surely forgets the intense interest in moral and religious problems which Tolstoy had always taken even in his youth; in The Cossacks, and in War and Peace, Tolstoy's heroes are continually searching for "the meaning of life."
The truth would appear to be that Tolstoy, in his youth greatly perplexed by philosophical and religious doubts, had never solved his problems, but had done what so many men do—evaded them by taking refuge in the joys and duties of practical life; but to most really thoughtful natures there comes a crisis when these duties will no longer serve as anodynes, and the old questionings, ten times stronger for their repression, return once more.
This was really the "Sturm und Drang" period of Tolstoy's life; it came unnaturally late, and its severity was proportioned to its delay. In the book entitled My Confession, Tolstoy has given a most sincere, graphic, and terrible account of his sufferings at this period. He traces its inception (surely with accuracy!) to the lack of any true religious faith in his youth. He tells how he had momentary gleams of revelation which showed him what a true religion might be, but his faith soon became merely conventional. Moreover, the new scientific materialism was spreading over Russia, and reaching the intellectual élite in the schools and colleges; the ceremonial, superstitious religion of the Greek Church, so essentially mediæval in all its methods of thought, could not stand against this dry, scientific determinism. Tolstoy gave way to scepticism and dissipation, and afterwards forgot and buried deep down his longings for a higher life.
After, as we shall see later, a desperate and almost overwhelming struggle, Tolstoy emerged from his darkness convinced that the true faith lay in a literal obedience to the precepts of the Gospel and especially to the Sermon on the Mount. He thought the precepts of the Gospel were realised more completely in the life of the Russian peasants than in that of any other human beings, and, taking their life as his model, he built up his creed: that the great essentials of life are labour and love, that man should be simple, laborious, and kind, that he ought to give more than he receives, to contribute to the common stock more than he takes from it, that he should rejoice in service; in this life he will find health and happiness, and he will not fear death because if he banishes egoism, the loss of his own personality—even to its total extinction—will not appear to him an evil.
This, stated in its essence, is the "solution" at which Tolstoy arrived, and from the year 1879 onwards we find him devoting his life almost entirely to moral and religious teaching.
Taking peasant life always as his model, he himself lived very frugally and simply; he partook only of the plainest food—vegetarian; he dressed like a peasant, he waited upon himself and did the work of his own room, and he "paid" even for this simple sustenance with the labour of his own hands; he worked at haymaking and reaping in the fields, at woodcutting in the woods, and in the winter he made shoes. He spent a portion of each day in manual labour, giving himself appetite to enjoy his simple diet; his temperance and toil kept him strong and vigorous, and he declared that he had as much time as ever to devote to intellectual work. Tolstoy, had, in fact, returned to the passionate and practical faith of the Middle Ages; his life was the life of a mediæval monk when monasticism was at its best—ascetic, laborious, intellectual—but his nineteenth century scepticism had caused him to omit and reject mediæval dogmas and superstitions.