Leo Tolstoy
Novelist & Philosopher
1828 – 1910 · Yasnaya Polyana, Russia
“He owned a thousand acres and spent his life trying to give it away.”
Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (Public Domain Mark 1.0, pre-1929)
Their life
Count Leo Tolstoy was born to the Russian aristocracy on a vast family estate, orphaned young, wild in his youth, a gambler and a soldier before he became the writer who would hold up a mirror to all of human life. In War and Peace he gathered an entire era — armies and ballrooms, history and the human heart — into a single vast canvas, and in Anna Karenina he traced the ruin of a passion with a tenderness that forgives even as it grieves.
At the height of his fame he underwent a wrenching change of heart. Tormented by the gap between his wealth and the poverty around him, he renounced his rank, dressed as a peasant, and devoted himself to a radical Christianity of nonviolence, simplicity, and love. His writings on conscience and the refusal to meet force with force would later guide Gandhi and, through him, the whole modern practice of nonviolent resistance.
He died at eighty-two in a remote railway station, having fled his own home and his old life in a final search for the simplicity he could never fully reach. We honor him as the giant who could contain multitudes and still be haunted by a single question: how, then, should we live?
Known for
- Wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, pillars of world literature
- Renounced his wealth and title to live by his moral convictions
- Developed a philosophy of nonviolence that influenced Gandhi
- Wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Resurrection
- Became a moral conscience for Russia and the wider world
One piece of advice for the world
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself — begin there, with your own life, and let it ripple outward.
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