Childhood and Kazan
Born at Yasnaya Polyana and orphaned young, he studied oriental languages and then law at Kazan University, leaving without a degree in 1847.
Nonviolent Christianity · critique of state and church · 1828–1910
Leo Tolstoy
Seek a meaning that death cannot undo, and refuse violence.
Yasnaya Polyana · Moscow · Astapovo
Biography
The thread of a life.
Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, turned in mid-life to the question of what gives life a meaning that death does not destroy. His answer, a rational Christianity centred on the Sermon on the Mount and stripped of dogma and church authority, led him to condemn state violence, private property in land and art made for an idle elite, and it inspired movements of nonviolent resistance.
Caucasus and Sevastopol
He served in the army in the Caucasus and at the siege of Sevastopol, publishing Childhood in 1852 and the Sevastopol Sketches in 1855.
School and marriage
After seeing an execution in Paris, he opened a school for peasant children on his estate and in 1862 married Sofia Behrs.
The great novels
War and Peace, serialised from 1865, and Anna Karenina, completed in 1877, established him as a major novelist.
Crisis and new faith
A Confession, What I Believe and The Kingdom of God Is Within You set out a Christianity without dogma, centred on non-resistance to evil.
Art, excommunication and death
After What Is Art? and the Synod’s condemnation of 1901, he corresponded with Gandhi and died at Astapovo after leaving home in 1910.
Understanding a life in depth
01Aristocratic youth and the army
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate south of Moscow. He lost his mother before the age of two and his father in 1837, and was raised by relatives. As an adolescent he read Rousseau with passion, and he later filled his diaries with rules for self-improvement; he studied at Kazan University but left without a degree. In 1851 he followed his brother Nikolai to the Caucasus and joined the army, and his first story, Childhood, appeared in 1852. The Sevastopol Sketches of 1855, drawn from the siege during the Crimean War, already set the plain truth of suffering against the official language of glory.
02Teacher, husband and novelist
After a first journey to Western Europe, where he witnessed a public execution in Paris in 1857, Tolstoy turned to the education of peasant children and in 1859 opened a school at Yasnaya Polyana that gave its pupils unusual freedom. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 he served as a local arbiter between landowners and peasants. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreyevna Behrs, who copied his manuscripts and later managed the estate and his publications; they had thirteen children. War and Peace, serialised from 1865 and completed in book form in 1869, closes with an essay on the philosophy of history, and Anna Karenina, completed in 1877, joins a tragedy of adultery to Levin’s search for faith.
03Crisis and a new reading of the Gospels
Around 1879, at the height of his fame, Tolstoy was overwhelmed by the thought that death would annul everything he did; A Confession recounts this crisis and his turn towards the faith of working people. He first returned to Orthodox practice, then rejected the dogmas, sacraments and authority of the Church and composed his own harmony and translation of the Gospels. What I Believe, in 1884, drew five commandments from the Sermon on the Mount, above all the command not to resist evil by force. Taking part in the Moscow census of 1882 confronted him with urban poverty, and What Then Must We Do? attacked the idleness of the rich and the power of money.
04Nonviolence, excommunication and the last journey
In the 1890s Tolstoy organised famine relief, wrote The Kingdom of God Is Within You against conscription and state coercion, and gave the proceeds of Resurrection to help the persecuted Doukhobors emigrate to Canada. What Is Art? condemned art made for a privileged few, and in 1901 the Holy Synod declared that he had separated himself from the Church. Disciples, journalists and visitors converged on Yasnaya Polyana, while quarrels over his copyrights and diaries strained his marriage. Gandhi, who published his Letter to a Hindu of 1908, corresponded with him until 1910. In the autumn of that year he left home secretly and, days later, died of pneumonia at Astapovo railway station.
His religious and moral writings shaped Christian anarchism, the Tolstoyan communities and the nonviolence of Gandhi, who corresponded with him in 1909 and 1910. Readers still debate his rejection of all coercion, his severe judgments on modern art and sexuality, and the tensions his teaching created within his own family.
Sources & reference points