Books: Tolstoy, Troglodyte

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The anguished seer that Tolstoy became after a religious crisis at 50 attracted both fame and followers of a kind that Sonya did not like. She hated the "institution" of her husband. Worn out by childbearing, jealous of his disciples (she called them "dark people"), infuriated by his decision to give up the copyrights on all his work after 1881, she gradually became a hysterical paranoiac. The familiar story of the last 25 years of their life together is terrible, ending in the old man's wild flight from home at 82, to die of pneumonia in a stationmaster's cottage—which the Soviet Government last year made into a Tolstoy shrine.

Biographer Simmons' sympathetic treatment of Tolstoy's religion of "nonresistance to evil," love for the common people, and individual self-perfection by undogmatic Christianity make it seem the titanic moral effort of an intellectual child, caught in the determinism of society and history upon which his own War and Peace was based. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him; the Communist Lenin wrote incisively: "On the one hand, an extraordinarily powerful, direct and sincere protest against social lies and hypocrisy; on the other, a Tolstoyan, that is, a wornout, historical sniveler called the Russian intellectual, who, publicly beating his breast, cries: 'I am bad, I am vile, but I am striving after moral self-perfection. . . .' " Yet Stalin's government has hailed Tolstoy as a literary hero of the Russian people.

Biographer Simmons, professor of Russian literature at Columbia, has also written biographies of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. His work on Tolstoy includes much material, such as diaries of Tolstoy's wife and his letters to her, that were unavailable to Aylmer Maude, whose Life of Tolstoy, published in 1910, has been standard in English. Along with a Russian biography by N. N. Gusev, of which only two volumes have yet appeared, the Simmons biography is the most authoritative and objective work on the subject.