On 20th November 1910 an old man died of pneumonia at a railway station in a small Russian town. It was an inauspicious end for one of the greatest writers of all time, Count Leo Tolstoy.
Leo Tolstoy was born in September 1828 into a wealthy and
noble Russian family on their estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula which is
south of Moscow.
After dropping out of university Tolstoy joined the army and
his service included the Crimean War of 1853-6. His experiences were to serve
him well as a writer.
He travelled to western Europe in 1857 and 1860-1, where he
met and was influenced by some of the greatest writers of his generation.
met and was influenced by some of the greatest writers of his generation.
Although he had written a number of short stories and essays
since his twenties, it was not until he had returned to Yasnaya Polyana that he
penned his greatest works, namely “War and Peace” (published 1869) and “Anna
Karenina” (1877).
Tolstoy was more than a great writer. He was also an
educational reformer, in that he founded schools for the children of serfs,
based on democratic principles.
He thought deeply about religion and politics and developed
a philosophy of “Christian anarchism” that rejected the state and also violence
as a means of settling disputes. His pacifist views would come to have a huge
influence on people such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Tolstoy was the father of ten children who survived to
adulthood, and most of them came to disagree with his philosophy of life and
found him to be a difficult man to live with. The family rift eventually persuaded
Tolstoy that he should renounce his lifestyle of wealth and privilege and
simply “run away from home”. His death occurred while he was doing exactly
that, but he was buried on his estate as he had always wished.
© John Welford
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