Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian count who fought in the Crimean War, gambled, farmed, married, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina in his thirties and forties. A religious crisis around 1880 turned him against the church, the state, property and his own novels; he took up the peasants’ dress and work, wrote parables and tracts, and in What Is Art? condemned most of the art of his class. Pilgrims came to Yasnaya Polyana from all over the world. He left home at eighty-two and died at a railway station. Hadji Murat, his last fiction, was found among his papers.