The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media

It was on this day in 1936 that Nationalist rebels launched a military uprising all across Spain, signaling the start of the Spanish Civil War. In February of 1936, a coalition of left-wing parties had come into office by less than two percentage points. The right-wing Nationalist Party, made up of the rich, the church, and the military, decided to take back power by force. General Francisco Franco amassed his army in Morocco, and he invaded Spain from the south and marched north toward Madrid.

It was one of the first wars in history to be covered minute by minute by the news media around the globe. Photography had been modernized to the extent that journalists could take action shots of battle, so it was the first time that newspapers could show pictures of actual warfare, rather than just the aftermath.

Hitler and Mussolini began providing support to Franco, and Stalin provided support to the Republicans. Intellectuals, writers, and artists joined the fight against the Nationalists. A relatively unknown journalist named George Orwell joined a workers' militia in Catalonia. Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos both covered the war as journalists, and both wrote novels about the war—Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Dos Passos, The Adventures of a Young Man (1939). The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca tried to remain neutral at first, but he eventually became a supporter of the Republicans, and he was assassinated by the Nationalists. The French novelist André Malraux recruited a squadron of airplanes and helped lead bombing raids against the fascists.

But Franco was an accomplished general and a brutally decisive leader. The Republicans, on the other hand, were split among their many factions, and they had no central leadership. And so Franco eventually won the war by March of 1939.

The French writer Albert Camus said, "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward."

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The marriage was not particularly happy for Sophia. She'd grown up in a cosmopolitan, aristocratic world, and after marrying Tolstoy, she had to live on a rural estate where her husband lived almost like a peasant. His house was extraordinarily simple, with no upholstered furniture and no carpets on the floor. He even wore peasant clothes, when he wasn't entertaining guests.

But for Tolstoy, the early years of his marriage were some of the happiest of his life. The regularity of married life let him settle down to work more steadily than ever before. And in the midst of that happiness, he wrote his first masterpiece, War and Peace (1863). It was the longest and most ambitious novel he'd ever written, and he was only willing to attempt it because he now had his wife to work as his secretary. When he would scribble corrections all over a rough draft, she was the only person who could decipher what his corrections said. Even he couldn't read his own handwriting. She ultimately copied by hand the 1400-page manuscript for War and Peace (1863) four times.

While he was working on War and Peace, free love was becoming fashionable among the Russian upper classes, and everyone started to think of marriage as old-fashioned and silly. Tolstoy was disgusted. In 1872, he heard about a woman who had thrown herself in front of a train after the end of an affair, and he went to view the body at the train station. He never forgot what he saw that day, and it gave him an idea for a novel about a woman whose life is destroyed by adultery.

That novel was Anna Karenina (1877), in which the story of the romance between Konstantin Levin and a young woman named Kitty was based almost entirely on Tolstoy's own marriage. When it was published, most critics said Anna Karenina was inferior to War and Peace, but it is now considered one of the greatest novels ever written. It begins, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

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