Leo Tolstoy Born: Russia's Greatest Novelist Arrives

Leo Tolstoy produced War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two novels so vast in scope and psychologically penetrating that they permanently redefined what fiction could achieve. War and Peace follows five aristocratic families through the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, blending domestic drama with military history and philosophical meditation on a scale that no novelist before him had attempted. Anna Karenina dissects a single woman's destruction by social convention with such precision that every reader since has felt they knew her. Born on August 28, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, his family estate in Tula Province, Tolstoy was a count who inherited a large estate and over 300 serfs. He studied law and languages at Kazan University, dropped out, lived recklessly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then joined the army, serving in the Caucasus and in the Crimean War. His war dispatches, Sevastopol Sketches, brought him his first literary fame. He wrote War and Peace between 1865 and 1869, at times while his wife Sophia copied out the manuscript by hand. The novel was serialized first and published as a complete work to enormous acclaim. Anna Karenina followed between 1875 and 1877. Together, the two works established Tolstoy as the greatest novelist alive. Then he underwent a spiritual crisis. In his fifties, he rejected the Russian Orthodox Church, rejected the value of his own novels, and developed a radical form of Christian pacifism and anarchism. He advocated nonviolent resistance to state power, simple living, and the abolition of private property. He tried to give away his estate. His wife and children fought him over the family's finances for the rest of his life. His ideas about nonviolent resistance influenced Mahatma Gandhi directly. Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy and later credited him as a major influence. Martin Luther King Jr. cited Tolstoy as part of the intellectual tradition that shaped the American civil rights movement. Tolstoy died on November 20, 1910, at 82, at a rural railway station. He had left home ten days earlier, fleeing his marriage. His impact extended far beyond literature into the political movements that reshaped the modern world.