Leo Tolstoy’s Life: A Story of Love, Loss, and Redemption

Leo Tolstoy: Leo Tolstoy, whose full name was the most unwieldy Count Lev Nikolayevich, was a Russian author, novelist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker and an influential member of the Tolstoy family.

Essay an Short Words “Leo Tolstoy” Biography  

“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling,
the artist has experienced.”

Tolstoy is widely considered one among the best of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the 2 books stand at the height of realistic fiction. As an ethical philosopher, he was notable for his ideas on passive resistance through his work, the dominion of God is Within You, which successively influenced such twentieth-century figures as Gandhi and Luther King, Jr.

Leo Tolstoy Biography 

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy family estate, a hundred miles south of Moscow on August 28, 1828. He was the fourth of five children. The Tolstoys were a well-known family of the old Russian nobility. His mother was born a Princess Volkonsky, while his grandmothers came from the Troubetzkoy and Gorchakov princely families. Tolstoy was connected to the grandest families of Russian aristocracy: Pushkin was his fourth cousin. His parents died when he was a toddler , and he was mentioned by relatives.

His childhood and boyhood were passed between Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana, in a large family of three brothers and a sister. Leo Tolstoy studied languages and law at Kazan University for 3 years. But he never took a degree. Dissatisfied with the quality of education, he returned within the middle of his studies back to Yasnaya Polyana, then spent much of his time in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In 1847, Tolstoy was treated for venereal disease. After contracting heavy gambling debts, he accompanied in 1851 his elder brother Nikolay to the Caucasus, and joined an artillery regiment. In the 1850s Tolstoy also began his literary career, publishing the autobiographical trilogy, Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857).

During the Crimean War, he commanded a battery, witnessing the siege of Sebastopol (1854-55). In 1857. He visited France. Switzerland, and Germany. After his travels, Tolstoy settled in Yasnaya Polyana, where he started a faculty for peasant children. He investigated during 1860-61, further travels to Europe, the educational theory and practice, and published magazines and textbooks on the subject. In 1862, he married Sonya Andreyevna Bers (or Behrs).

Between the years 1865 and 1869 appeared Tolstoy’s major work, War and Peace, an epic tale depicting the story of five families against the background of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Tolstoy’s other masterpiece, Anna Karenina (1873-77), told a tragical story of a married woman, who follows her lover, but finally at a train station, throws herself in front of an oncoming train.

In the 1880s, Tolstoy wrote such philosophical works as A Confession, and What I Believe, which was banned in 1884. He gave up his estate to his family, and attempted to measure as a poor, celibate peasant. Attracted by Tolstoy’s writings, Yasnaya Polyana was visited by many people from everywhere the planet . In 1901, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him.

About Life History Leo Tolstoy Essay Words 

Tolstoy died of pneumonia on November 7, 1910 at a remote railway junction after leaving his estate on the urge to live as a wandering ascetic. His collected works, which were published in Soviet Union , contains 90 volumes. A letter Tolstoy wrote in 1908 to an Indian newspaper entitled Letter to a Hindu resulted in intense correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi, who was in South Africa at the time and was beginning to become an activist. Reading The Kingdom of God is Within You had convinced Gandhi to abandon violence and espouse non-violent resistance, a debt Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy, “the greatest apostle of non-violence that this age has produced”.

The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi lasted only for a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy’s death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to give the name, the Tolstoy Colony, to his second ashram in South Africa. Besides non-violent resistance, the Iwo men shared a common belief in the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy’s essays.