Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910

Count Leo Nikolaievitch Tolstoy, novelist, was born on 28 August 1828, at Yasnaya Poliana in the government of Tula. He studied at Moscow and Kazan, joined the army of the Caucasus, was attached to the staff of Prince Gortschakoff in Turkey, and was at the storming of Sebastapol in 1855. He, now retired from the army, and already famous as a poet and novelist, spent a short time in the most brilliant literary and social circles of St Petersburg. Having travelled in Germany and Italy, in 1862 he married, and from that time lived on his estates near Moscow amongst his peasantry. During his residence in the Caucasus he wrote Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth; Memoirs of Prince Nekludoff: and The Cossacks. After the Crimean war he wrote three sketches of Sebastapol; during his foreign sojourn, The Snow Storm and the Two Hussars; next came Family Happiness, The Three Deaths, and Polikushka. The first of his two great works, War and Peace (1865–68), gives a vivid picture of the Napoleonic campaigns against Russia and the national defence. The other, Anna Karenina (1875–78), is a melancholy tale of an ill-fated marriage. He now resolved to devote himself to the problems of life, remedying its grievances, and becoming the ‘friend of the unfriended poor;’ and all his later books were written with didactic aim. Ivan Ilyitch, What People Live By, Where Love is there God is also, Two Pilgrims, The Dominion of Darkness, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Christianity of Christ, What I Believe and Life - all insist on an ideal of life in which revolutionary discontent and religious confidence, morbidly ascetic Puritanism, and an almost Buddhist resignation (denying the right of self-defence by force) are strangely combined. Having made over his wealth to his wife, he lived as poorly as a peasant in his wife’s house. In What is Art? (1898) he taught that only art is good which moves the masses, and to good ends; what is written for the select can only be bad art. In The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), Master and Man (1894), Patriotism and Christianity (1896) and Resurrection (1900), his departure from orthodoxy became increasingly manifest, the Holy Synod excommunicated him, and he denounced the worship of Jesus as blasphemy and the sacraments as gross sorcery. In 1910 he suddenly left home, designing to end his days in ascetic seclusion, fell ill and died at Astapovo on 20 November.