Jane Addams and Leo Tolstoy

I. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

A. Early Life

1. Russian aristocracy--Tolstoy's family was part of the Russian aristocracy; his family owned an estate located about 120 miles south of Moscow, near the town of Tula, called Yasnaya Polyana. Until 1861, the work on this estate would have been completed by serfs, since they were freed by czarist decree that year.

2. Death of parents--Tolstoy's parents died when he was quite young (he was the fourth of five children), and after their deaths he was raised by relatives.

3. Indifferent student--Tolstoy's resisted most of the efforts to educate him in the traditional Russian fashion, his teachers believed him "unwilling and incapable" of learning much of anything.

4. Boredom--Tolstoy spent much of his early manhood among the Russian high society in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but professed to be bored by that kind of life.

B. Tolstoy the Soldier

1. Gambling debts--like many young, dissolute, and bored male Russian aristocrats, Tolstoy spent a good part of his idle time gambling, and managed to run up a substantial gambling debt. He fled with one of his brothers to the Caucasus, and there joined the Russian army in time for the Crimean War.

2. Crimean War--considered by many the first "modern" war, for participants like Tolstoy it was remembered as a bloodbath. Tolstoy used much of the horror he experienced in this war in his great novel War and Peace, but his experiences here did much to later make him into a pacifist.

3. Retired--at the end of the Crimean War in 1856, Tolstoy resigned from the military. During the years between 1857 and 1861, Tolstoy took two trips to western Europe. During these trips,  he became very interested in Western educational methods,  and brought back some of these methods and established schools on his estate for the children of the peasants living there.

C. Tolstoy the Writer--Tolstoy first made his reputation as a writer of "realist" fiction; his first three novels, Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857) were thinly disguised autobiography.

1. Marriage--in 1862 Tolstoy married Sonya Behrs. At first, the couple seemed to be quite in love, and his wife edited his early novels and acted as Tolstoy's literary agent. The couple had 13 children together, but 5 died in childhood.

2. War and Peace (1869)--Tolstoy's first great masterpiece, is at heart a novel of family,  and the first demonstration of Tolstoy's belief in the unimportance of the lives of "great" people on the course of world events.



3. Anna Karenina (1875-1877--it was published in installments)--on a superficial level, it is the story of a Russian princess, Anna Karenina,  and her lover Count Vronsky, who are both married to other people. But on a deeper level it is also an indictment of the hypocrisy of Russian royal society.

D. Christian  Anarchist--during the time Tolstoy was writing Anna Karenina, he also experienced a spiritual awakening. He renounced the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, and instead proselytized that people were able to know and affirm the good within themselves if they just engaged in self-examination and willingly reformed themselves.

1."My Confession"  (1882)--the description of his spiritual quest

2. "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1894)--described his version of Christianity, and it was principally this essay that drew Jane Addams to him.

II. The 3rd European Trip

A. England--with Mary Rozet Smith and  her parents; Addams purpose was to visit with Edward Caird, professor at Oxford University and author of Evolution of Religion

B. Russian--accompanied by Smith and her parents to France and Germany, but Smith and Addams went by themselves to Russia to visit Tolstoy.



1. Yasnaya Polyana--Addams and Smith--like hundreds of others each year--visited Tolstoy at his former estate. By this time in his life, he had relinquished claim to his estate to his family, and renounced copyright to all of his work written before his conversion (his wife had acquired those copyrights).

2. Tolstoy the peasant--Tolstoy was 68 when he met Addams, but continued to work in the fields and dress in peasant garb. He had by this time not only renounced most of his wealth, but also given up sex.

3. Grilling Addams--Tolstoy sharply questioned Addams attire (she was wearing a fashionable traveling ensemble), and denounced her for living as an absentee landlord. Despite her admiration for Tolstoy (particularly his pacifism and renouncement of all kinds of violence), she stood her ground against his sharp questioning.

a. The visit to Tolstoy did result in Addams attempting to spend two hours every day baking bread in the Hull House Coffee Shop; but she soon realized that she did not have two hours every day to spare to devote to this project.