Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist and moral thinker, born Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow, where he spent most of his life. He served as an artillery officer at Sevastopol, traveled in Europe, founded a school for peasant children and in the 1860s and 1870s wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. A religious crisis then led him to renounce fiction of that kind and to preach a Christianity of nonviolence, poverty and manual labor that brought him disciples around the world and excommunication at home. He died at a railway station after leaving home at eighty-two.