Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy wrote two of the largest and most admired novels ever published, then repudiated them along with his property, his church and his class. Born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow, he was a count by inheritance and an orphan by nine, raised by relatives. He left Kazan University without a degree, gambled heavily, and joined an artillery regiment. He served in the Caucasus and at the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55, and his Sevastopol Sketches described war without glory, which made his name. War and Peace, serialised from 1865 and published complete in 1869, follows five aristocratic families through the Napoleonic invasion and contains a sustained argument against the idea that great men direct history. Anna Karenina, published from 1875 to 1877, opens with the observation about happy families and ends with a suicide he had researched at a railway station near his home. He married Sophia Behrs in 1862, when she was eighteen; she bore thirteen children and copied out War and Peace repeatedly by hand. The marriage became one of the most documented and unhappy in literary history. Around 1877 he underwent a religious crisis described in A Confession. He arrived at a Christianity stripped of miracles, sacraments and church authority, centred on the Sermon on the Mount and non-resistance to evil. He was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. He renounced his copyrights and tried to give away his land, which his family resisted bitterly. His doctrine of non-violence directly influenced Gandhi, with whom he corresponded. In November 1910, aged eighty-two, he left home in the night and died days later at Astapovo station.

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