Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (Yasnaya Polyana, 1828 - Astapovo, 1910) was a Russian writer from an aristocratic family and one of the most influential figures in world literature. His novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina are considered, together with the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the peak of Russian realism. His moral and religious thought, however, reached far beyond fiction and came to shape nonviolent movements and democratic education in the twentieth century.

He was born on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, in the province of Tula, some 200 kilometres south of Moscow. He lost his mother at two and his father at nine, and was brought up by relatives. He studied at Kazan University without taking a degree, and for years lived a lax, leisurely life of gambling, debts and stays in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. He began writing during this period. His first novel, Childhood, appeared in 1852 and, together with Boyhood and Youth, formed a semi-autobiographical trilogy. In 1851 he joined his older brother in the Caucasus and later served as an artillery officer during the Crimean War. The experience produced the Sevastopol Sketches, based on what he had seen at first hand. Appalled by the number of deaths, he left the army once the war was over.

In 1857 he travelled to Paris, where he witnessed a public execution, an experience that stayed with him for the rest of his life. After serfdom was abolished in 1861, he founded schools for peasant children on his estate. The project was short-lived, hampered by the Tsarist police, but it is seen as an early forerunner of democratic education. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs, with whom he had thirteen children, and in the following years he wrote his great novels. War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) join private lives to the society and history of their time with a psychological precision that shaped the novel for generations.

Around 1870 he went through a deep moral crisis, which he later described in Confession (1882). Afterwards he sought a literal reading of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centred on the Sermon on the Mount, and became a Christian anarchist and pacifist. He argued that the state rests on coercion and that violence cannot be justified by religious or political ends, ideas he set out in The Kingdom of God Is Within You. He also became an advocate of Georgism, Henry George's theory of land value, which he wove into Resurrection (1899). His rejection of inherited wealth led him to give up the copyrights on his earlier works, which strained his marriage.

His influence reached Mahatma Gandhi, who wrote to him seeking advice and corresponded with him on nonviolence. His ideas later inspired Martin Luther King Jr. Virginia Woolf called him the greatest of all novelists. Although he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906, he never received it, a fact that remains a subject of debate.