14. Rich, famous, and loved by his family, Leo Tolstoy became depressed and contemplated suicide
The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was responsible for two works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, seen by some as the best novels ever written. Virginia Woolf (above), for example, described Tolstoy as ‘the greatest of all novelists’. He wrote in a brutally realistic fashion, with no recourse to artifice. The great nineteenth-century critic and poet Matthew Arnold thus described Tolstoy’s novels as more a piece of life than a piece of art. His work is, in places, notoriously bleak and miserable, and perhaps responsible more than any other author’s for the stereotype of Russian literature.
But, just as Tolstoy ‘had a good wife… good children and a large property… [and] could believe my name already famous’, he became depressed. Tolstoy wrote movingly of his mental illness in Confession: ‘I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence’. Tolstoy also explored themes of depression, guilt, and suicide in Anna Karenina, his final novel, which ends with Anna throwing herself under a train.
