Leo Tolstoy

Biography

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) was the most celebrated writer in Russia — and one of the most morally tortured. Born into the landed aristocracy, he lived the aristocratic life he depicted (gambling, hunting, seducing peasant women, military service in the Caucasus) before undergoing a radical spiritual crisis in the 1870s that turned him toward pacifism, vegetarianism, and a Christianity stripped of church dogma. He wrote Anna Karenina during this crisis — and the crisis is inside the novel, in Levin's suicidal despair and his final conversion. Tolstoy himself hid ropes so he would not hang himself. The novel that emerged from that darkness is one of the masterworks of world literature. He later dismissed it as insufficiently spiritual, which tells you something about what surviving a spiritual crisis can do to your aesthetic judgment.

Leo Tolstoy at a glance