Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the estate of Yasnaya Polyana near Tula, into an old family of counts. He lost his mother at two and his father at nine and was brought up by an aunt. He left the University of Kazan without a degree and went back to the estate to try, without success, to improve the lives of his serfs. At twenty-three he joined the army in the Caucasus, and later fought in the defence of Sevastopol in the Crimean War; his war stories, drawn from his own experience, made him famous. At thirty-four he married Sophia, and on the estate he went on to write War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Around the age of fifty he passed through a profound spiritual crisis; thereafter he preached 'non-resistance to evil by force', gave up the copyright of his works, wore peasant clothes, and ploughed and made shoes with his own hands. At eighty-two he left home in the middle of the night, and ten days later died at a small railway station.