Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate south of Moscow, served in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol, and between 1863 and 1877 wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. A spiritual crisis after Anna Karenina turned him to religious and moral writing and to the doctrines of non-violence and simplicity that made him, by the end of his life, a world figure; the late fiction includes The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. He died at the railway station of Astapovo after leaving home at eighty-two.