Authors

Russian · 1828–1910

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists in the history of literature, whose War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) are pinnacles of the form. Born into Russian aristocracy, he served in the Crimean War before devoting himself to writing. A moral and spiritual crisis in his fifties led him to renounce his earlier work and pursue an ascetic Christian anarchism — he was eventually excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He died at a small railway station, Astapovo, at eighty-two, having fled his estate.