Biskar Reads Excerpt from Tolstoy's War and Peace

Eleven children survived Leo Tolstoy, the 19th-century Russian author, but death shadowed his early years more heavily. His mother died when he was two years old, and his father passed away when he was eight. The aunt who raised him also died when he was 13.

Tolstoy served as an artillery officer in the Russian army during the Crimean War before turning to fiction. He became famous for his realist novels, including Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He also wrote plays, novellas, and short stories throughout his career.

Despite his literary success, Tolstoy struggled with depression and questions about the meaning of life. He married and raised a large family, yet he felt haunted by mortality. In his writing, he questioned whether human despair was a natural state.

“Perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood something? It cannot be that this condition of despair is natural to man!” Tolstoy wrote. “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

Natanya Biskar read an excerpt from War and Peace on October 22. The reading was part of a monthly theme centered on haunted writing. This was the fourth week of October for the series.

The program, Something I Heard, received support from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.