Leo Tolstoi

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist, moralist, and spiritual reformer whose two great novels — War and Peace and Anna Karenina — are consistently placed among the supreme achievements of world literature. Born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his family estate south of Moscow, he studied at Kazan University without graduating, served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, and began publishing fiction in the 1850s. War and Peace appeared in serial form from 1865 to 1869; Anna Karenina from 1875 to 1877. A severe spiritual crisis in the late 1870s led Tolstoy to renounce his aristocratic life, embrace a form of Christian anarchism he expounded in works like A Confession and What Then Must We Do?, and attempt to live as a simple peasant. His later short fiction — The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man, Hadji Murat — matches anything in his earlier work. He died in 1910 at a railway station, having left his estate aged eighty-two.

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