Tolstoy, Leo, graf
1 book in the library
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist and thinker, born on his family’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow, into an old aristocratic family. Orphaned as a child, he left university without a degree and served in the army in the Caucasus and in the Crimean War, experiences that went into his early stories and Sevastopol Sketches. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs, who bore him thirteen children and copied out his manuscripts. On the estate he wrote War and Peace (1865–1869) and Anna Karenina (1875–1877). A spiritual crisis in the late 1870s, described in A Confession, led him to a radical Christianity of non-violence, simplicity and rejection of property and the state; he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901, and his ideas influenced Gandhi. His later works include The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Resurrection. At eighty-two he left home secretly and died at a remote railway station in 1910.
