LEV NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY (1828-1910) was born in Yasnaya Polyana as the fourth son of Maria Volkonsky and Count Nikolai Tolstoy. His mother died when he was just 18 months old and he and his brothers were mainly raised by aunts. Leaving Kazan University early, young Lev for a time led a rather dissolute and debauched life before following his brother Nicholas into the military, serving in the Caucasus before and during the Crimean War. Writing about these experiences launched his literary career. Tolstoy primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life he focused more on didactic plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are widely acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and pinnacles of realist fiction. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated personality and for his extreme moralism and asceticism, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist, and led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.Tolstoy's rejection of personal wealth and his long battle with his wife over the rights and royalties to his works eventually precipitated his sudden departure from Yasnaya Polyana in 1910, and his eventual death at the remote train station of Astapov (wonderfully dramatized in the novel The Last Station, by Jay Parini, and the film based on the book).
