Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist born into the landed aristocracy and orphaned before he was ten. He served as an artillery officer at the siege of Sevastopol and wrote about it while it was still going on, which made his name; War and Peace and Anna Karenina followed on the estate he had inherited. A crisis in his fifties turned him into a Christian anarchist who preached non-violence, renounced his property and the copyrights on his later work, and quarrelled with his family about it for thirty years. He left home at eighty-two and died at a railway station a few days later.