Historical Figure
Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910
Russian writer (1828–1910)
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Biography
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time.
Timeline
The story of Leo Tolstoy, told in moments.
Born at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow. Old Russian nobility. His mother dies when he's 2. His father dies when he's 9. Raised by relatives. Enrolls at Kazan University, drops out. Gambles heavily. Runs up debts. Joins the army and fights in the Crimean War. He is 26 and hasn't written anything yet.
Finishes War and Peace after six years of writing. It's 1,225 pages with over 500 characters. He researches the Napoleonic Wars obsessively, visits the battlefield of Borodino, reads dispatches and memoirs. His wife Sophia copies the manuscript out by hand seven times. He calls it "not a novel."
Publishes Anna Karenina in serial form. He begins it after witnessing a woman throw herself under a freight train near his estate. The first line: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Virginia Woolf calls him "the greatest of all novelists."
Suffers a devastating spiritual crisis. Rich, famous, healthy. Considers hanging himself. He writes Confession, describing how the question "Why do I live?" nearly destroys him. He rejects the Orthodox Church, reads the Gospels literally, embraces Christian anarchism and nonviolence. He renounces his property. His wife refuses to go along.
Publishes The Kingdom of God Is Within You. A book arguing that all government force is immoral and that the Sermon on the Mount requires absolute pacifism. Gandhi reads it in South Africa and calls it overwhelming. It shapes his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. traces his intellectual lineage through Gandhi to Tolstoy.
Runs away from home at 82. He's been fighting with Sophia for years over his property and his radical beliefs. He catches pneumonia on the train and dies at the railway station at Astapovo. His last words to his daughter: "I love truth very much." Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Never won. It's still considered one of the great Nobel controversies.
In Their Own Words (20)
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886), 1886
...никогда Христос ... ни одним словом не утверждал личное воскресение и бессмертие личности за гробом...
Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave., 1884
Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.
My Religion (1884), Ch. 12, 1884
I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.
My Religion (1884), as translated in The Human Experience : Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry (1989) by the Quaker US/USSR Committee, 1884
One can insult an honest man or an honest woman, but to tell a thief that he is a thief is merely la constation d'un fait [The establishing of a fact.]
Pt. IV, ch. 4, 1875
Artifacts (15)
Leo Tolstoy: What is Art? and Essays on Art
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