Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Born 9 September 1826
Died 20 November 1910

War and Piece

Anna Karenina

Sketches of Sivastapol
Based on Crimean War.

His approach to non violent protests for social change influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, junior.

He was deeply religious man and followed Christianity.

Currently Russians are Orthodox Christians.

Greatest writer of all times.
Towering figure in Russian literature.
Charles Dicken lived at the same time.
Like a wise old grandpa with amazing stories.
CD was a poor city boy whereas LT was a country gentleman. Dicken wrote monthly or weekly.
LT wrote epic long stories like family, society and politics. CD believed in life opportunities and was very optimistic.
LT believed in mystical forces within self and was recklessly pessimistic.
CD dreaming of future and fortune(capitalistic outlook) and LT looking inside and purpose in life.
Dickens stories are overtly sentimental whereas LT overtly moralistic (eastern approach).
Egalitarianism was a dominant philosophy in the west. The most famous was of Karl Marx equality of rights of mankind.
The sacrifice of soldiers was normal in war and the glory went to the generals and kings.
Two who lived through this period were LT and CD who captured the mood in literary sense.
CD
Good Expectations
Tales of Two Cities
Christmas Carol

LT
Pioneered art of story telling by traumatization.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Psychological depth and dramatic structure in his literature and journalistic writing.

Leo Tolstoy
Sociological and more comparable to Dickens.
Childhood, boyhood and youth is modelled on CD's David Copperfield.
LT went to France and met Victor Hugo.
Dickens wrote about ugly side of industrial revolution while LT wrote about ugly side of history warfare.

Likes
English peasants vs Russian counts
Father was sent to prison for unpaid debts.
Count into an aristocratic family.
Dickens troubles with money.

Tolstoy troubled with life.
His mother died when he was two and his father died when he was nine.

What is the purpose of this life?

CD worked 10 hours as a 15 year old.
Learned how to write shorthand.
He became a journalist.
Started writing short stories.
He rose up the social ladder.

Tolstoy was a sloppy student.
He quit oriental languages in the university.
His life was easy.

He pursued alcohol, women and gambling.
He realized he need a bigger purpose in life and joined the army to fighting the Crimean war in 1850.
He used this experience in his masterpiece in War and Peace.
Horrors of war changed his perspective in life.
Lead to pessimism.

Dickens met Victor Hugo and Alexander Duma in France. Dickens was global figure.
CD had 10 children and LT had 13.
LT met Victor Hugo 15 years after CD.
Huge impact on him reading les miserables.
He returnec to Russia and started writing War and Peace.
In 1853 CD had a midlife crisis and left his wife with 10 children and married an 18 year girl.
Dickens had a stroke and died 58  in 1870.

Unlike Dickens Tolstoy crisis was the purpose of life. In his 50s he disowned his novels and confessed his religious belief.

Struggles for meaning constantly shifting from Arthur  Schopenhauer's negation of self and Christian belief.

Died in 1910 aged 82 in a railway station.

Anton Pavlovich Chekov

1. Leon Tolstoy
Sociologist
Moralize

2. Dostoevsky
Psychologist

3. Stepan Kolesnikoff
Artist

4. Alexandra Pushkin
Poet

5. Maxim Gorky
Revolutionary writer

6. Anton Chekov
Story Teller

7. Nikolai Gogol
He was a Russian story writer and a play writer who influenced later writers.

He was a Ukraine writer. The Ukrainian culture and folklore influenced his writing.
His writing style wads called grotesque or distorted or repulsively ugly.

The Nose
The Overcoat
The diary of a Madman

Born in 1st April 1809

Died in 4th March 1852

We all came under Gogol's undercoat is a saying that come his work overvoat.


Below is about Chekov
Father of short stories.
He was the artist of the mundane.
To escape from reality he choose literature.

He was living at a time when Russia was waking up with outpouring of literature.
His mother probably would have told him many stories.
Talent from our father.
Our soul from our mother.
He failed in Greek.
When he was 16 his father went bankrupt. To avoid jail he fled to Moscow.
He had to support family financially and keep them cheerful by writing letters and stories.
He read lot of fiction.
He read books by philosophers like Schopenhauer.
Busy chasing with older women including one of the wife of his teachers.
He managed to enter Moscow State University.
Within 4 years he got his doctorate.
He achieved all this without any help.
all by himself.
He has come from poverty and he wanted to give something back.
It all came at a cost to himself.
It was his writing which kept him going.
He won the prestigious Pushkin Prize.
Other writers were getting old and Russia needed young blood which Chekov filled.
He wrote a story book Steps while in Ukraine.
Ivanoff became a hugh success.
Painter of reality in his stories.
This was revolutionary at his time.
Everything in the story should have a purpose.
Tidy story telling.
He wrote about all human horrors he observed.
He wanted the authorities to treat criminals humanely.
Human Rights.
Tolstoy fought in Crimean war.
George Orwell wrote poverty in London and Paris.
He moved to a village while practicing medicine he wrote his classics.
He became an atheist.
When his health was failing he moved to Crimea where he met Tolstoy and Gorky.

One of the greatest Russian play writers and a physician.

The Seagull

The Cherry  Orchard.

Uncle Vanya

Three Sisters

Were his classics.

Lady with the dog.

Born 29 January 1860
Died  15 July       1904 aged 44.

He probably died of tuberculosis which he probably acquired during resident work.
He took a neural stand on morality, politics and religion.

In short stories one should focus attention with minimalistic details. In novels one can diverge but not in short stories.
Less is more approach.
Follow intuition.
Telling the Truth
Brutal Honesty
These are escape from reality and philosophy.
Human behaviour in real life.
Wil to Joy
Joy is all temporary.
Happiness is not enduring but a myth.
We anticipate death.
Final Words
He made himself invisible in his stories.
He appears heartless in depicting the reality.


He says, medicine is his lawful wife and writing was his mistress.

He was probably spending all his earning on his big family.
He was down to earth and idealist in his philosophy.

Maxim Gorky

Alexi Peshkove

Born 1868.
He died at the age of 69 in 1937.
Ophan at the age of 11.
Raised by maternal grandmother.
Ran way at the age of 12 in 1880.
Assistant for a shoemaker
Erand boy.
Assistant to icon painter.
Dish washer.
Cook made him to read books.

He was a street boy (which is quite normal behaviour) and dropped out of school instead of studying languages and history.

He read a lot.

Father of Soviet Revolutionary literature.

He propagated Socialist Idealism.

For 15 years he traveled throughout Russia and turned to become a writer.

He used to make lot of spelling mistakes and his wife was the proof reader.

He was known for his naturalistic writing style.

His book "Mother" which Lenin praised as a timely book.

He associated Anton Chekov and Leo Tolstoy.

He was a prolific writer.
He had over 500 literary work in a national paper.

He was active with emerging socialist movement.

He was arrested several times and imprisoned.

He met Vladimir Lenin and developed a personal friendship.

He was a Bolshevik but criticized Lenin.

Headed the union of soviet writers.
He became a publisher to promote his political writing that were related to Russian Revolution.
He went to America to raise funds for the revolution.

He made an impression on Mark Twain.

He was a good chess player.

After the assassination attempt of Lenin his relationship with Lenin deteriorated.
However, Joseph Stalin treated him well and he had a summer house in Crimea and Winter houses in Russia.

He was not allowed to migrate to Italy probably fearing copyright infringement of his material by foreign investors.
Besides, the payments were low in Russia.
Not having a legal wife to inherit his copyrights should be understood in this light.

Financial dealing were shoddy both in Russia and in the west.

He was known for his short stories and catch phrases.

He probably believed in god, quite contrary to the Marxist atheistic beliefs.

Vladimir Lenin

Only person whose baby picture was flowing into space.
Founder of the Soviet Union.
Gave orders to kill the entire royal family of Tsar Nicholas.
His body is preserved for decades.
He masterminded the Russian Revolution on the Theory of Marxism.
To some he is a hero and for others he was evil villain.
Born 1870
He came from a happy home.
Mother Maria descended from a wealthy Jewish family.
Father was a director of education for an entire province.
They were considered hereditary nobility.
They were from section of Intelligentsia and debated over philosophy and politics in their spare time.
His brother Alexandra went to university in Pietersburg and there he believed the failure of the Romanov Empire.
To save Russia they had to be removed.

They formed a terrorist group to kill the king and they were caught and hanged.
Lenin was expelled from his school and he decided to educate himself.
The king relieved peasants from their landlords as a conciliatory gesture having felt the revolutionary trends in the country.
He read Karl Marx and other revolutionary advocates and writers.
1891 famine was a catalyst to show failing Russian economy.
Nearly 5 million people died.
Coronavirus endemic contributed to deaths.
Karl Marx believed that a revolution would come from an individualized country.
But it was peasants who rose against the Tsar.
It was called Leninism.
Also demanded shorter hours of work and better pay.
He was arrested when he wad 22.
He was 17 when his brother was hanged.
Hid prison was a comfortable place. He had family visits and read books.
Allowed to write his revolutionary essays.
He was exiled to Siberia.
Siberia was very long writer's retreat.
He met his wife and married in exile.
He published political themes in various pseudo names.
Moved to Germany aged 30 and continued to publish his revolutionary ideas.
Joseph Stalin was one of his conspirators/  revolutionists who disseminated his writing.
Stalin of course took Lenin's place after his demise.
He was well respected intellectual and thought would rise to power almost immediately but not to be.
Even among Intelligence anyone who disagreed with him were fearlessly dealt with.
He decided to take time off in Swiss Alps and let his Bolsheviks take care of his political activity.

Protest at Winter Palace for 8 hour work.
Tsar ordered the guards to shoot and thousands died.
Bloody Sunday outraged the people.
Country wide protest began and Lenin read that time was right for him to steer the revolution. He tried to incite people but it did not work and he fled to Switzerland.
World War I started and everything damped down.
Tsar went to front line to fight the war.
War was a disaster and millions died.
Revolution was starting take effect without him.
Soldiers wanted to end the war and they started revolting.
Provincial government leader was Alexander Kerensky. He was a lawyer and Lenin could not match him in a debate.
He fled again.
He was called a German spy.
This time he went to Finland.
Alexander Kerensky outlawed the Bolshevik party.
In October 1917 he came back to Russia and convinced Red Guards and Bolsheviks to overthrow the Tsar.
It worked on the 4th attempt.
Every Though  many historian write Kenin as a impatient character I believe he had the patience, charisma and intelligence to understand that the Revolution was not a Instant Remedy but a painstaking slow process in spite of tremendous effort.

That is my estimate as a medical man not a politician.
This type of guys are rare in history.
Take Ceylon as an example, many of our politicians are opportunists and theoreticians.
They were not pragmatic and JVP in many forms is another example.
40 years in politics but nothing much to show off.
I am putting these down to educate the masses.
Ceylon is in wrong hands presently and various political wings are like fishing on muddy and trouble waters.
Lenin overthrew the provisional government without a single vote casted for him.

If he waited any longer I would not be writing anything about Lenin.

Lenin was crafty man but it took a long time to come to power just like J.R.J in Ceylon and he was well past 80 when he became our president and ruined our politics and we have not recovered from the LOANS taken from the IMF.
Whereas Russia has come out of its economic meltdown and giving a run for CIA and the West.
Peace
Bread
Land were his promises.
Old Grand Daddy Lenin was going to take care of Russia and Russians.

His rule was not conciliatory but brutal and he was decisive of getting rid of the Tsar.

Unfortunately guy who followed him was a true autocrat and a dictator.

It is very difficult to predict history but who would have ever guessed President Putin would come this far.

When he retires he would have surpassed even Stalin.

He is much cleverer and 90% of Russians love him.

In a democracy only 50% (in Ceylon one who was not elected by the people is running the country. He is no Lenin) of the guys and girls vote a guy/girl  to power.

A woman shot him twice but survived.
Lenin let the socialism gradually changed to capitalism.

President Putin was the beneficiary.

Lenin died in 1924.

Petrograd was changed to Leningrad!

Vladimir Putin

This is to make a statement about Russians.

30 million Russians died fighting Germans Nazis.

Stalin and Trotsky were the architects of this victory.

Neither Winston Churchill nor Roosevelt helped until Russians entered Berlin causing total defeat of Nazis.

Nazis are raising their heads again, through Ukraine and CIA.

When things go bad CIA will sacrifice Zelensky and it is thier normal game plan.

East German Angela Merkel was a BIG Cheat on behalf of CIA in 2014.

I believe the Nazi Rump has infiltrated the CIA.

The Canadian incident and Bandera Outfit of Zelensky are the proof of the pudding.

Americans want to undermine the Germans and they blew up the Russian pipeline.

Russia has got another gas pipeline and they should never give gas to Germany for another 10 years (they should not be allowed to operate Nuclear Power, lest they develop nuclear arsenal).

Zelensky wanted to develop Nuclear Arms in their Nuclear Plant.This is where Russians decided to say enough is enough and got hold of one of the two operating systems.

Other plant is still disputed.

CIA plans unlike good old days are blatantly obvious.

Iran Nuclear deal is not OK but Ukraine developing nuclear arsenal is OK.

In spite of fighting wars in the past  Iran and Russia, are mending their ways.

Enemies' enemy is a good friend!

Israel has to walk on a tight rope.

There are lot of Jews still in Russia.

Trotsky was a Jew.

Zelensky is supposed to be Jew with  Nazi Bandera.

Russia is giving Nuclear Fuel to Bangladesh.

Western hegemony is falling down under President Biden.

Turkey and India playing double deals and can never be trusted.

Coming to President Putin he is not sacrificing his foot soldiers unlike Stalin.

His rockets are plummeting Western arm dumps in Ukraine.

CIA attempt to temporary ceasefire is to hoodwink Russia again like Angela Merkel.

Stalin of course developed the Nuclear Bomb for Russia.

Putin is selling his Nuclear Fuel and France cannot have double deals for its small Nuclear reactors.

Putin has changed, this world upside down and he never  trusts UK, USA and Canada.

Australia has to walk a tight rope, since it has to get its gas from outside or go nuclear.

It is a changing world.

I wish I kick the bucket earlier than late.

Joseph Stalin

I won't wright a piece on Mao Zedong who was a mass murderer.
He killed 30 to 45 million Chinese during Operation Leap Forward.
To this add 15 million killed in Tibet.

Only, the British killed similar number in mainland China and Hong Kong using two Opium Wars.
This is to take over Chinese Tea Industry.



In that sense Joseph Stalin killed only 6 million Russians. This may go upto 9 million premature deaths in gulags.

For anti-communist he was a mass murderer ( compare with Mao Zedong).
For most Russians he was a statesman and a nation- builder.

In Russia a Jew (Leon Trotsky) or Muslim (Chechens and Tartars) can live with equal dignity provided they do not propagate disorder.

Similarly Orthodox Church operate in Russia, unlike in China (10,000 Buddhist temples were destroyed by Mao Zedong) there is no freedom for religion.

Born in Georgian town of Gori.
He was brought up behind violence.

His birth name was Joseph Vissarionovich.

December 18th 1878.
In 1894 he graduated 2 years ahead of his schedule.
He was sent to a Church for learning but was taken up by Marxism at an early age.

He was an atheist.

He hated Tsar.

His code name was Koba.

His father was a shoemaker.
He ruled Russia over 25 years with an iron fist.
Single death is a tragedy and million deaths is statistics.
He started leaning Russian at age 9 and haf a typical Georgian accent.

Similar to Trotsky he was good in his speeches and organizing strikes.
He used writing to propagate his agenda.

He relocated to coastal town of Batumi in Georgia.
He was taken into prison for organizing and sent to Siberia
He was sent to 0rison and each time he managed to escape.

1903 the workers party broke into two sections.

Mensheviks

Bolsheviks

Lenin was impressed with Stalin.
Called him wonderful Georgian.
He was taken into communist party committee.
This time he changed his name to Stalin
Man of Steel.
First World War in 1914 accelerated the collapse of Tsar regime.
1917 Provisional Government.
Tsar Nicholas abdicated.
Year later Lenin ordered the killing of the entire royal family.

Stalin was living in Siberia during the whole revolution.

Leon Trotsky fought and defeated the White Army that supported thr Tsar.
Lenin of course took him to the Central Committee.
Stalin was appointed to lead the army at Stalingrad.
He frequently went loggerhead with Trotsky.
Due to internal strife the Bolsheviks changed its name to Communist Party.
Lenin made him General Secretary of the Communist Party.
Autonomy for Georgia was not granted (renege) and he fell out with Lenin.
Stalin executed the Georgian Rebellion.
Lenin was absolutely furious.Lenin castigated Stalin.
After the death of Lenin Stalin became Lenin!
This called deification of Lenin.
Trotsky was exiled.
He confiscated peasants lands. Poor management of agricultural land, lead to famine.
10 million died in Ukraine.
He brought the law to deny defense.

Automatic leader was born.
He methodically purged anybody who opposed him.

Nazi crossed the Soviet Border in spite of a pact with Germany.
400,000 Russians were were surrounded by pincer movement in Minsk.
25 millions Russians died in the war with Germans.

He celebrated his 70th birthday in 1949.

In 1953 he had a paralyzing stroke.
Died March 5th, 1953.

Rein from 1924 to 1953.

Nikita Khrushchev succeed him.

German invaded Russia in 1941.
In 1945 Russians pushed German to Berlin and captured Berlin.

In 1949 Russia had developed Atomic Bomb.