Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on 9 September 1828 (28 August in the old Russian calendar) at Yasnaya Polyana, his family's estate south of Moscow. His mother died when he was two and his father when he was nine; he was raised by aunts. He studied oriental languages and law at Kazan University but left without a degree.

As a young man he gambled, kept a diary of his failings and resolutions, and tried to improve the lot of his serfs. In 1851 he followed his brother to the Caucasus and joined the army, where he wrote his first published work, Childhood (1852).

Tolstoy served as an artillery officer during the Crimean War and took part in the defence of Sevastopol in 1854–55. His Sevastopol Sketches, describing the siege with unflinching realism, made him famous in Russia.

After the war he travelled in Western Europe, where he saw a public execution in Paris that horrified him, and opened a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana. In 1862 he married Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, eighteen years old; they had thirteen children, of whom eight survived childhood.

War and Peace, published between 1865 and 1869, follows several aristocratic families through the Napoleonic Wars, from 1805 to the French invasion of Russia in 1812, mixing fiction with chapters on the philosophy of history. Sophia copied out the huge manuscript several times by hand.

Anna Karenina, serialised from 1875 to 1877, contrasts the tragic love of Anna and Count Vronsky with the search for meaning of the landowner Konstantin Levin, a self-portrait of the author. Both novels are celebrated for their vast range of characters and their psychological truth.

Around 1880 Tolstoy went through a spiritual crisis, described in A Confession. He developed a personal Christianity based on the Sermon on the Mount, rejecting violence, private property and the authority of the state and the official Church, which excommunicated him in 1901. He dressed as a peasant, gave up meat and alcohol, and tried to give away his copyrights, to his wife's dismay.

His late works include The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the novel Resurrection, whose royalties he gave to help a persecuted religious group emigrate to Canada, and Hadji Murat. In 1910 he exchanged letters with the young Gandhi, then in South Africa. On 28 October 1910 (old style) he left home secretly at night; he fell ill on the train and died on 20 November (7 November, old style) at the small station of Astapovo.