Leo Tolstoy

Born Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy on September 9, 1828, at the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow, Tolstoy was the fourth of five children in an aristocratic family. Both parents died before he was ten. He studied Oriental languages and law at Kazan University but left without a degree, returning to Yasnaya Polyana to manage the estate. In 1851, he joined the army and served in the Caucasus and the Crimean War, experiences that produced the Sevastopol Sketches (1855) and his semi-autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (1852-1856). In 1862, he married Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, eighteen years his junior, and the marriage, though it produced thirteen children, would become one of the most famously tortured unions in literary history. War and Peace (1869), a panoramic novel of the Napoleonic invasion encompassing over five hundred characters, is widely considered the greatest novel ever written. Anna Karenina (1878), with its devastating opening line about unhappy families, followed. In the late 1870s, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis so severe he contemplated suicide, emerging as a radical Christian anarchist and pacifist whose ideas on nonviolent resistance profoundly influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1901. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Hadji Murat (published posthumously in 1912) rank among the greatest novellas ever written. On October 28, 1910, at age eighty-two, Tolstoy fled his estate in the night. He fell ill on a train and was taken to the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, where he died of pneumonia on November 20, 1910, the world's press gathered outside.

At eighty-two, Tolstoy crept out of his estate in the dark, unable to bear the gulf between his preaching of poverty and the comfort of his household. He boarded a third-class train heading south with no clear destination. Within days he fell ill with pneumonia at a remote railway station.