We know him in English as Leo Tolstoy, but he would have been more familiar with “Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. He was born September 9, 1828 in Russia, into an aristocratic family (hence the title “Count”). He’s regarded as one of the greatest writers — not just from Russia, and not just from the 1800s — in the world, and for all time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature every year from 1902 to 1906. He was also a pacifist, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909.
He didn’t initially appear to be destined for a literary career; his teachers described him as “both unable and unwilling to learn,” and he dropped out of college without graduating. He spent a couple of years basically partying in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. He ended up with some hefty gambling debts, and when he was 23 joined the army, possibly to get away from them. He did pretty well in the army; he fought in the Crimean War, was cited for bravery, and promoted to lieutenant. But he later said he was appalled by all the death, and at the end of the war left the army.
He had started writing just before joining the army, and his first book, Childhood, was published during the war. Afterward he traveled around Europe and gradually transformed from a privileged rich kid who could write into a man of principles. His principles, which he espoused for the rest of his life, included nonviolence and a spiritual form of anarchy. He wrote, in a letter, “The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens … Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.” Later on he wrote A Letter to a Hindu” to Tarak Nath Das in 1908. It was published in a South African newspaper, where it caught the eye of a young man just beginning to become and activist: Mohandas Gandhi.
Tolstoy got married when he was about 34, and had a large family of 8 children (they actually had 13, but five died as infants). He was still an aristocrat, so all his children were also counts and countesses — and the longest-lived of his children survived until 1979. His wife Sonya also became his secretary and editor as he worked on his most famous books, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
War and Peace is probably one of the greatest novels ever written, but it’s not exactly a weekend read. There are 580 characters, some of whom are depictions of actual historical figures. Tolstoy himself, though, did not consider it a novel at all; he believed his writing (and that of other writers) was an examination of nineteenth-century life, both socially and politically. He did agree that Anna Karenina was a novel, in that it was entirely fictional. He ended up rejecting both of those books, though, along with most other Western culture, as “counterfeit art” that was elitist and undermined the values he came to embrace after having a spiritual “awakening,” as he called it, in the 1870s. He even inspired a small group that called themselves “Tolstoyans,” but the group never really grew and eventually faded away.
In his later years, Tolstoy turned more toward economic theory, and became a proponent of “Georgism,” a philosophy based on the writings of Henry George, an American economic reformer. It seems to suggest that there should only be one tax, based on something called “land value.” You’ll have to look it up for yourself if you want the details. At the end of his life he may have become slightly disoriented — in late November, 1910, when he was 82, he secretly left home at night and took a train south. It was winter in Russia, of course, and he came down with pneumonia. The station master at the train station he arrived at took him home and called the doctor, but he passed away. His books, though, have remained in print steadily for more than a century. So far.
