The Author

Born to Privilege

Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in Tula Province, about 200 kilometers south of Moscow. He was a count — the Tolstoys were one of the oldest and most distinguished aristocratic families in Russia, with estates, serfs, and a lineage stretching back to the fifteenth century. His mother, Princess Maria Volkonskaya, died when he was two. His father, Count Nikolai Tolstoy, died when Leo was nine. The children were raised by relatives, moving between Kazan, Moscow, and Yasnaya Polyana.

He was a difficult child — restless, proud, and passionate. He hated school. He enrolled at Kazan University at 16, studied Oriental languages, then law, and dropped out without a degree. He spent his early twenties in the typical pursuits of a young Russian aristocrat: drinking, gambling, womanizing, and running up debts. He kept a diary — a habit he would maintain for the rest of his life — and filled it with self-lacerating confessions about his failures of will and morality.

The Soldier

In 1851, to escape his debts and his brother's nagging, Tolstoy followed his elder brother Nikolai to the Caucasus and joined the Russian army. He served as an artillery officer — the same role Prince Andrei Bolkonsky would hold in War and Peace. He fought in the Crimean War (1853–56), including the brutal siege of Sevastopol, where Russian forces held out against British, French, and Turkish troops for nearly a year.

His wartime experiences — the chaos of battle, the randomness of death, the courage and cowardice of soldiers — became the foundation of his literary career. He wrote three sketches of Sevastopol that were published in the journal The Contemporary and made him famous overnight. The sketches were remarkable for their unflinching realism: Tolstoy described war not as glory but as confusion, mud, and suffering. He was praised by Tsar Alexander II himself.

Writing War and Peace

After the Crimean War, Tolstoy resigned his commission and traveled to Europe (1857 and 1860–61). He was disappointed by what he found. In Paris, he witnessed a public execution by guillotine that sickened him. He met Victor Hugo and Turgenev but quarreled with the latter. He returned to Russia convinced that Western European civilization was shallow and corrupt, and that the answers to life's questions lay not in progress but in the soil, the peasants, and the Russian soul.

In 1862, at the age of 34, he married Sophia (Sonya) Behrs, the 18-year-old daughter of a court physician. The marriage was passionate, productive, and turbulent. Sonya would bear him 13 children, copy out the manuscript of War and Peace seven times by hand, and eventually grow to resent him. But in the early years, they were happy. Tolstoy settled at Yasnaya Polyana and, for the first time in his life, found the discipline to write.

He began what would become War and Peace in 1863. The original idea was a novel about the Decembrists — the aristocratic reformers who attempted a coup in 1825 — returning from Siberian exile. But as Tolstoy dug into the history, he found himself drawn backward, to the war of 1812, then to 1805. The novel kept growing. He rewrote it multiple times. He read hundreds of historical sources, visited the battlefield of Borodino, and interviewed survivors. He argued with historians, insisting they had gotten everything wrong. The book that emerged in 1869 — after six years of obsessive labor — was not the novel he had started with. It was something entirely new: a work that was simultaneously a novel, a historical treatise, and a philosophical essay on the nature of history itself.

The Conversion

After War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina (1877), which many consider an even greater novel. But by the late 1870s, he was in crisis. Despite his fame, wealth, and family, he felt life was meaningless. He contemplated suicide. He read the Gospels, the Buddha, Schopenhauer. He emerged with a new philosophy: a Christian anarchism that rejected the Orthodox Church, the state, private property, and violence. He became a vegetarian, gave away his copyright, and dressed like a peasant.

His conversion tore his family apart. Sonya resisted his attempts to give away their property. His followers — the Tolstoyans — gathered at Yasnaya Polyana and irritated his wife. In November 1910, at the age of 82, Tolstoy fled his estate in the middle of the night, hoping to live as a wandering monk. He caught pneumonia at a remote railway station in Astapovo. The world's press gathered to watch him die. He passed away on November 20, 1910, with his final words reportedly: “Truth... I love much...”