Leo Tolstoy was a renowned Russian author born in 1828. He wrote acclaimed novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. After experiencing success as a writer, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis and developed his own unconventional religious beliefs, causing a rift with the Russian Orthodox Church and straining his marriage. He spent his later years establishing himself as a moral and religious leader while continuing to write, before dying in 1910 at the age of 82. To this day, Tolstoy is considered one of the greatest authors of all time.

1. Leo Tolstoy - War And Peace
Leo
Tolstoy
9-
September
1828
To
20-
November
1910

2. Leo Tolstoy Biography
Author (1828–1910)
Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote the acclaimed
novels
 War and Peace,

5. Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote the acclaimed
novels
 The Death of Ivan Ilyich
and still ranks among the world's top writers.

6. Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote the acclaimed
novels
 Anna Karenina

7. Synopsis
 On September 9, 1828, Leo Tolstoy was born
in Tula Province, Russia. In the 1860s, he
wrote his first great novel, War and Peace. In
1873, Tolstoy set to work on the second of his
best known novels, Anna Karenina. He
continued to write fiction throughout the 1880s
and 1890s. One of his most successful later
works was The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy
died on November 20, 1910 in Astapovo,
Russia.

8. Early Life
 On September 9, 1828, writer Leo Tolstoy was born at his
family's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula Province of
Russia. He was the youngest of four boys. In 1830, when
Tolstoy's mother, née Princess Volkonskaya, died, his father's
cousin took over caring for the children. When their father,
Count Nikolay Tolstoy, died just seven years later, their aunt
was appointed their legal guardian. When the aunt passed
away, Tolstoy and his siblings moved in with a second aunt, in
Kazan, Russia. Although Tolstoy experienced a lot of loss at
an early age, he would later idealize his childhood memories
in his writing.

9. Early Life
Tolstoy received his primary education at home, at the hands of French
and German tutors. In 1843, he enrolled in an Oriental languages
program at the University of Kazan. There, Tolstoy failed to excel as a
student. His low grades forced him to transfer to an easier law
program. Prone to partying in excess, Tolstoy ultimately left the
University of Kazan in 1847, without a degree. He returned to his
parents' estate, where he made a go at becoming a farmer. He
attempted to lead the serfs, or farmhands, in their work, but he was too
often absent on social visits to Tula and Moscow. His stab at becoming
the perfect farmer soon proved to be a failure. He did, however,
succeed in pouring his energies into keeping a journal—the beginning
of a lifelong habit that would inspire much of his fiction.

10. Early Life
As Tolstoy was flailing on the farm, his older brother,
Nikolay, came to visit while on military leave.
Nikolay convinced Tolstoy to join the Army as a
junker, south in the Caucasus Mountains, where
Nikolay himself was stationed. Following his stint as
a junker, Tolstoy transferred to Sevastopol in Ukraine
in November 1854, where he fought in the Crimean
War through August 1855.

11. Early Publications
While Tolstoy was working as a junker for the Army, he had
free time to kill. During quiet periods he worked on an
autobiographical story called Childhood. In it, he wrote of his
fondest childhood memories. In 1852, Tolstoy submitted the
sketch to The Contemporary, the most popular journal of the
time. The story was eagerly accepted and became Tolstoy's
very first published work.
After completing Childhood, Tolstoy started writing about his
day-to-day life at the Army outpost in the Caucasus. However,
he did not complete the work, entitled The Cossacks, until
1862, after he had already left the Army.

12. Early Publications
Amazingly, Tolstoy still managed to continue writing while at
battle during the Crimean War. During that time, he
composed Boyhood (1854), a sequel to Childhood, the second
book in what was to become Tolstoy's autobiographical
trilogy. In the midst of the Crimean War, Tolstoy also
expressed his views on the striking contradictions of war
through a three-part series, Sevastopol Tales. In the
second Sevastopol Tales book, Tolstoy experimented with a
relatively new writing technique: Part of the story is presented
in the form of a soldier's stream of consciousness.

13. Early Publications
Once the Crimean War ended and Tolstoy left the Army, he
returned to Russia. Back home, the burgeoning author found
himself in high demand on the St. Petersburg literary scene.
Stubborn and arrogant, Tolstoy refused to ally himself with
any particular intellectual school of thought. Declaring
himself an anarchist, he made off to Paris in 1857. Once there,
he gambled away all of his money and was forced to return
home to Russia. He also managed to publish Youth, the third
part of his autobiographical trilogy, in 1857.
Back in Russia in 1862, Tolstoy produced the first of a 12
issue-installment of the journal Yasnaya Polyana, marrying a
doctor's daughter named Sofya Andreyevna Bers that same
year.

14. Major Novels
Residing at Yasnaya Polyana with his wife and children,
Tolstoy spent the better part of the 1860s toiling over his first
great novel, War and Peace. A portion of the novel was first
published in the Russian Messenger in 1865, under the title
"The Year 1805." By 1868, he had released three more
chapters. A year later, the novel was complete. Both critics
and the public were buzzing about the novel's historical
accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, combined with its
thoughtful development of realistic yet fictional characters.
The novel also uniquely incorporated three long essays
satirizing the laws of history. Among the ideas that Tolstoy
extols in War and Peace is the belief that the quality and
meaning of one's life is mainly derived from his day-to-day
activities.

15. Major Novels
Following the success of War and Peace, in 1873, Tolstoy set to
work on the second of his best known novels, Anna Karenina. Anna
Karenina was partially based on current events while Russia was at
war with Turkey. LikeWar and Peace, it fictionalized some
biographical events from Tolstoy's life, as was particularly evident in
the romance of the characters Kitty and Levin, whose relationship is
said to resemble Tolstoy's courtship with his own wife.
The first sentence of Anna Karenina is among the most famous lines
of the book: "All happy families resemble one another, each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina was
published in installments from 1873 to 1877, to critical and public
acclaim. The royalties that Tolstoy earned from the novel
contributed to his rapidly growing wealth.

16. Religious Conversion
Despite the success of Anna Karenina, following the
novel's completion, Tolstoy suffered a spiritual crisis
and grew depressed. Struggling to uncover the
meaning of life, Tolstoy first went to the Russian
Orthodox Church, but did not find the answers he
sought there. He came to believe that Christian
churches were corrupt and, in lieu of organized
religion, developed his own beliefs. He decided to
express those beliefs by founding a new publication
called The Mediator in 1883.

17. Religious Conversion
As a consequence of espousing his unconventional—
and therefore controversial—spiritual beliefs, Tolstoy
was ousted by the Russian Orthodox Church. He was
even watched by the secret police. When Tolstoy's
new beliefs prompted his desire to give away his
money, his wife strongly objected. The disagreement
put a strain on the couple's marriage, until Tolstoy
begrudgingly agreed to a compromise: He conceded
to granting his wife the copyrights—and presumably
the royalties—to all of his writing predating 1881.

18. Later
Fiction
In addition to his religious tracts, Tolstoy continued to write
fiction throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Among his later
works' genres were moral tales and realistic fiction. One of his
most successful later works was the novella The Death of Ivan
Ilyich, written in 1886. In Ivan Ilyich, the main character
struggles to come to grips with his impending death. The title
character, Ivan Ilyich, comes to the jarring realization that he
has wasted his life on trivial matters, but the realization comes
too late.

19. Later Fiction
In 1898, Tolstoy wrote Father Sergius, a work of fiction in
which he seems to criticize the beliefs that he developed
following his spiritual conversion. The following year, he
wrote his third lengthy novel, Resurrection. While the work
received some praise, it hardly matched the success and
acclaim of his previous novels. Tolstoy's other late works
include essays on art, a satirical play called The Living
Corpse that he wrote in 1890, and a novella called Hadji-
Murad (written in 1904), which was discovered and published
after his death.

20. Elder Years
Over the last 30 years of his life, Tolstoy established himself as a
moral and religious leader. His ideas about nonviolent resistance to
evil influenced the likes of social leader Mahatma Gandhi.
Also during his later years, Tolstoy reaped the rewards of
international acclaim. Yet he still struggled to reconcile his spiritual
beliefs with the tensions they created in his home life. His wife not
only disagreed with his teachings, she disapproved of his disciples,
who regularly visited Tolstoy at the family estate. Their troubled
marriage took on an air of notoriety in the press. Anxious to escape
his wife's growing resentment, in October 1910, Tolstoy and his
daughter, Aleksandra, embarked on a pilgrimage. Aleksandra,
Tolstoy's youngest daughter, was to serve as her elderly father's
doctor during the trip. Valuing their privacy, they traveled incognito,
hoping to dodge the press, to no avail.

21. Death and Legacy
Unfortunately, the pilgrimage proved too arduous for the aging
novelist. In November 1910, the stationmaster of a train depot
in Astapovo, Russia opened his home to Tolstoy, allowing the
ailing writer to rest. Tolstoy died there shortly after, on
November 20, 1910. He was buried at the family estate,
Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula Province, where Tolstoy had lost so
many loved ones yet had managed to build such fond and
lasting memories of his childhood. Tolstoy was survived by
his wife and their brood of 10 children. (The couple had
spawned 13 children in all, but only 10 had survived past
infancy.)

22. Death and Legacy
To this day, Tolstoy's novels are considered among
the finest achievements of literary work. War and
Peace is, in fact, frequently cited as the greatest
novel ever written. In contemporary academia,
Tolstoy is still widely acknowledged as having
possessed a gift for describing characters'
unconscious motives. He is also championed for his
finesse in underscoring the role of people's everyday
actions in defining their character and purpose.