Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910 2 entries
Biography
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer, one of the greatest novelists of all time. He was born into a noble family at Yasnaya Polyana, the estate south of Moscow where he spent most of his life. He served in the army in the Caucasus and in the Crimean War, and his Sevastopol Sketches made his name as a writer. In the 1860s and 1870s he wrote War and Peace, a vast picture of Russia during the Napoleonic wars, and Anna Karenina.
In middle age he went through a deep spiritual crisis and developed his own Christian teaching, which rejected the Church and the state and called for nonviolence, simple living and love of one’s neighbour. His ideas inspired Gandhi, with whom he corresponded. At eighty-two he secretly left home, fell ill on the journey and died at the railway station of Astapovo in 1910.
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