Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, known in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist and moral thinker, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which are widely counted among the greatest novels ever written. In later life he turned away from his own art and from the Orthodox Church to preach a radical Christianity of non-violence, simplicity and refusal to obey the state, and became one of the most famous people in the world.

Tolstoy was born on 9 September 1828 (28 August in the Julian calendar then used in Russia) at Yasnaya Polyana, his family's estate near Tula, south of Moscow. He belonged to an old noble family of the Russian Empire. His mother, Princess Mariya Volkonskaya, died when he was not yet two, and his father, a veteran of the war of 1812, died in 1837; he and his brothers and sister were brought up by relatives. In 1844 he entered the university of Kazan, first to study oriental languages and then law, but he was a poor student and left without a degree in 1847. The next few years he spent between his estate, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, gambling, drinking and running up debts, while keeping a diary full of resolutions to improve himself.

In 1851 he followed his elder brother Nikolai to the Caucasus, where he joined the army as a cadet and took part in raids against the mountain peoples. There he wrote Childhood (1852), a lightly fictional account of his early years, which appeared in a leading Petersburg journal and made his name. During the Crimean War, fought by Russia against the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France, he served as an artillery officer in the siege of Sevastopol. His Sevastopol Sketches (1855) described the fighting with a frankness about fear, vanity and death that was new in Russian writing. After the war he left the army, travelled in western Europe twice, and was shaken by seeing a public execution in Paris in 1857.

Back at Yasnaya Polyana he opened a school for the children of his peasants, around the time the serfs were freed in 1861, and wrote on education, arguing that children learn best without compulsion. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs, sixteen years his junior, the daughter of a Moscow doctor. They had thirteen children, of whom eight survived childhood. Sophia ran the household and the estate, and copied out his drafts by hand, some of them many times over. The first fifteen years of the marriage were happy and the most productive of his life.

War and Peace, published in instalments from 1865 and as a book in 1869, follows several aristocratic families, above all the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, and the restless Pierre Bezukhov, through the Napoleonic Wars, from 1805 to the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and its aftermath. It mixes private lives, battle scenes such as Austerlitz and Borodino, and long essays in which Tolstoy argues that history is not made by great men like Napoleon, who he thought only imagined they were in control, but by the countless actions of ordinary people. Tolstoy himself said it was not a novel in the usual sense.

Anna Karenina, serialised from 1875 to 1877 and published as a book in 1878, tells two stories side by side. Anna, the wife of a senior official, leaves her husband and son for the officer Vronsky, is shut out by society and finally throws herself under a train. Konstantin Levin, a landowner who resembles the author, marries, works his land and searches for the meaning of life. The book is admired for its psychological depth and for the way it presents ordinary moments with great clarity.

In the late 1870s, at the height of his fame, Tolstoy fell into a deep crisis, haunted by the thought of death and the apparent pointlessness of life. He described it in A Confession, written around 1879 to 1882 and banned in Russia. His way out was a personal reading of the Gospels, centred on the Sermon on the Mount. He rejected the authority of the Church, its rituals and the divinity of Christ, and took from Jesus a set of moral commands: do not be angry, do not resist evil with violence, do not swear oaths, love your enemies. From this he concluded that the state, armies, courts and private property in land were all based on force and that Christians should refuse to take part in them. He set out these views in books such as What I Believe (1884) and The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894).

He tried to live by them. He gave up meat, alcohol and tobacco, dressed in peasant clothes, worked in the fields and made his own boots, and renounced the copyright on his works written after 1881. He organised famine relief in 1891 and 1892, and gave the earnings of his last novel, Resurrection (1899), to help the Doukhobors, a pacifist sect persecuted by the government, to emigrate to Canada. His followers, the Tolstoyans, formed communities in Russia and abroad. The Holy Synod excommunicated him in 1901. He kept writing fiction, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Hadji Murat, published after his death, as well as the essay What Is Art? (1897), in which he dismissed much of the art he had once admired, including his own.

His beliefs put great strain on his marriage. Sophia resented his wish to give away the family's property, and fought bitterly with his close disciple Vladimir Chertkov over the rights to his works and his diaries. On 10 November 1910, aged eighty-two, Tolstoy secretly left home in the night, intending to live out his life in simplicity. He fell ill with pneumonia on the train and died at the small railway station of Astapovo on 20 November 1910. He was buried at Yasnaya Polyana, without religious rites, in a grave with no cross or stone.

Tolstoy's ideas on non-violent resistance had a direct influence on Mahatma Gandhi, who corresponded with him in 1909 and 1910 and named a settlement in South Africa Tolstoy Farm. Through Gandhi they reached later movements of civil disobedience. In Russia, Vladimir Lenin called him the mirror of the Russian revolution, praising his attack on the old order while rejecting his religion, and after the Russian Revolution his estate became a museum. As a novelist he remains a model for the realistic depiction of whole societies and inner lives, and his major novels are still read and adapted for film and stage around the world. He was nominated many times for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never received it.