对列夫托尔斯泰的英文评价/简介.

Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana,the family estate in the Tula region of Russia。The Tolstoys were a well-known family of old Russian nobility。He was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy,a veteran of the crusade of 1812,and Countess Mariya Tolstaya (Volkonskaya)。Tolstoy's parents died when he was young,so he and his siblings were brought up by relatives。In 1844,he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University。His teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn。" Tolstoy left university in the middle of his studies,returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent much of his time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg。In 1851,after running up heavy gambling debts,he went with his elder brother to the Caucasus and joined the army。Around this time,he started writing。His conversion from a dissolute and privileged society author to the non-violent and spiritual anarchist of his latter days was brought about by two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860–61,a period when many liberal-leaning Russian aristocrats escaped the stifling political repression in Russia; others who followed the same path were Alexander Herzen,Mikhail Bakunin,and Peter Kropotkin。During his 1857 visit,Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris,a traumatic experience that would mark the rest of his life。Writing in a letter to his friend V。P。Botkin:The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit,but above all to corrupt its citizens 。。。Henceforth,I shall never serve any government anywhere。A portrait of Tolstoy's wife Sophia and their daughter AlexandraHis European trip in 1860–61 shaped both his political and literary transformation when he met Victor Hugo,whose literary talents Tolstoy praised after reading Hugo's newly finished Les Miserables。A comparison of Hugo's novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace shows the influence of the evocation of its battle scenes。Tolstoy's political philosophy was also influenced by a March 1861 visit to French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels。Apart from reviewing Proudhon's forthcoming publication,La Guerre et la Paix,whose title Tolstoy would borrow for his masterpiece,the two men discussed education,as Tolstoy wrote in his educational notebooks:If I recount this conversation with Proudhon,it is to show that,in my personal experience,he was the only man who understood the significance of education and of the printing press in our time。Fired by enthusiasm,Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded thirteen schools for his serfs' children,based on the principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay "The School at Yasnaya Polyana"。[citation needed] Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police,but as a direct forerunner to A。S。Neill's Summerhill School,the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education。