Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually known in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer born on 9 September 1828, old style 28 August, at Yasnaya Polyana, his family estate south of Moscow. He came from an aristocratic family and was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, a veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812, and Princess Mariya Tolstaya. His mother died when he was two, and his father when he was nine, so Tolstoy and his siblings were brought up by relatives.

Tolstoy began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University in 1844, but his teachers described him as “both unable and unwilling to learn.” He left before finishing, returned to Yasnaya Polyana, and spent time in Moscow, Tula, and Saint Petersburg, living a lax and leisurely life. During this period he began to write. His first novel, Childhood, a fictitious account of his own youth, appeared in 1852 and became the first part of the semi-autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, published from 1852 to 1856.

In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. He served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War and was in Sevastopol during its 11-month siege in 1854 and 1855, including the Battle of the Chernaya. He was recognised for courage and promoted to lieutenant, but he was appalled by the number of deaths in warfare and left the army after the war. His Sevastopol Sketches, published in 1855, drew on those experiences and helped bring him early acclaim.

Tolstoy is best known for the great realist novels War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878), and Resurrection (1899), the last of which was based on what he called his “youthful sins.” His work also includes the novella Family Happiness (1859), The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and later works such as The Devil, “Alyosha the Pot,” “After the Ball,” and Hadji Murat. He wrote plays and essays as well, often on philosophical, moral, and religious themes.

Several events changed how Tolstoy thought. His army service and two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860–61 moved him away from the life of a privileged society author and toward non-violence and spiritual anarchism. In Paris he witnessed a public execution, an experience that marked him for life. He met Victor Hugo and read Les Misérables; he also visited Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Brussels, discussed education with him, and later used the French title La Guerre et la Paix for War and Peace. After returning to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy founded 13 schools for the children of peasants newly emancipated from serfdom in 1861.

In the 1870s, Tolstoy underwent a moral crisis followed by a spiritual awakening, described in Confession (1882). His literal reading of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centered on the Sermon on the Mount, led him to become a Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, set out in works such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), affected figures including Mahatma Gandhi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Bevel. Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize but never awarded one, Tolstoy remains a writer whose words carry weight because they join the scale of history with the private search for conscience.