Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher whose two great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are among the supreme achievements of world literature. After completing Anna Karenina he underwent a spiritual crisis recorded in A Confession, and devoted the second half of his life to a radical Christian anarchism centered on the Sermon on the Mount, the renunciation of violence, and the dignity of manual labor. His later writings, including The Kingdom of God Is Within You, profoundly influenced Gandhi's development of nonviolent political action.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, and religious-political thinker whose work shaped both Russian and global intellectual life across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born to an aristocratic family on the Yasnaya Polyana estate, served briefly in the Russian army during the Crimean War, and produced the two great novels — War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) — that secured his reputation as one of the supreme novelists in any tradition.

In the late 1870s Tolstoy underwent a profound religious crisis recorded in A Confession (1882). His mature thought — set out in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), What Is Art? (1897), and many shorter works — combined a personal Christianity stripped of supernatural and ecclesiastical elements with a comprehensive ethical commitment to non-resistance to evil, voluntary poverty, manual labor, and rejection of the modern state. He was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.

Tolstoy's late religious-political vision had enormous influence beyond Russia. His correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi between 1909 and his death in 1910 helped shape Gandhi's developing satyagraha. The American social gospel movement, the Christian anarchist tradition, and twentieth-century pacifism all drew heavily on his writings. He died at the railway station of Astapovo in November 1910 after leaving Yasnaya Polyana in a final attempt to live the simple religious life his philosophy demanded.