Leo Tolstoy Biography

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (commonly known as Leo Tolstoy) was born on September 9, 1828 on an aristocratic family estate near Tula, Russia. As a child he experienced a great deal of loss. His parents died when he was young. An aunt became his legal guardian, but she too died. Tolstoy and his siblings were then raised by another aunt. 

As a child, Tolstoy was a voracious reader but a poor student. In college he studied law and oriental languages but was labeled as “both unable and unwilling to learn” by faculty. He left school and, apart from spending time writing, pursued a life of debauchery. He was prone to excessive partying, visiting brothels, and addicted to gambling. As a means of escape, he joined the army with his older brother in the Caucasus region of southern Russia. It was a hard, nomadic life that exposed Tolstoy to peasants, hard-working people, and a way of life quite different from his privileged family status. It was also grist for his developing literary abilities. He produced a trilogy of semi-autobiographical work that gained him substantial acclaim.

He left the army in 1855, the same year one of his brothers died of tuberculosis. Five years later, the disease would also claim the brother with whom Tolstoy had served in the military. Tolstoy resorted back to his old ways and struggled to find meaningful direction. His literary skills were in demand, but he undermined his own opportunities and set off for the first of two trips to Western Europe. In Paris, he witnessed a public execution that traumatized him and shaped his distrust of government. On his second trip to Europe, Tolstoy met Victor Hugo and the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The acquaintances helped round out Tolstoy’s literary development and political worldview. 

Tolstoy returned to Russia and founded thirteen schools for peasant children of newly emancipated serfs. Arguably the first structured example of democratic education, Tolstoy’s experiments proved to inspire other future educators and alternative programs. 

In 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs. His wife became an essential supporter of his work in a variety of administrative, financial, and practical ways. Tolstoy began writing what many have called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace, followed by Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy began writing what many have called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace…

Tolstoy’s literary success led to an accumulation of wealth, but he nevertheless grew depressed and continued to seek higher meaning to life. He sought understanding through the Russian Orthodox Church, but concluded that Christian churches and organized religion, in general, were corrupt. Tolstoy continued seeking answers, extracting wisdom from all the major religious traditions and a variety of philosophical schools. Eventually, it was the ascetic morality found in the German philosopher Arthur Shopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation that resonated with Tolstoy. 

Monument to Leo Tolstoy on Prechistenka sculpted by S. D. Merkurov, State Museum of Leo Tolstoy, Moscow

Photo: Wikipedia / Shakko

The last thirty years of Tolstoy’s life were characterized by his conversion away from his earlier hedonistic ways toward a denial of self as a path to true spiritual nobility. Tolstoy had parted with the Church, but not with what he believed to be the true teachings of Jesus. Tolstoy believed true happiness was to be found not in doctrine but through inner work and compassion. In The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893), Tolstoy presented his theory on the inescapable corruptive tendency of governments to wage war and built his case for pacifism based on the nonviolence espoused by Jesus. This work would have a profound influence on a number of peacemakers including Jane Addams, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In December 1908, in response to a request from an Indian revolutionary, Tolstoy wrote an open letter (published in English as a “A Letter to a Hindu”) calling for nonviolent resistance to the British colonial rule of India. Mohandas Gandhi, who was working as an attorney in South Africa, received the letter and with Tolstoy’s permission published it in a South African newspaper. The exchange began a continuing correspondence between these two luminaries until Tolstoy’s death in 1910. In that same year, Gandhi established an ashram in Transvall, South Africa. He named it Tolstoy Farm in honor of the man he called “one of the clearest thinkers in the western world.”

Leo Tolstoy died of pneumonia on November 20, 1910 at the age of 82. He was buried at the Yasnaya Polyana family estate, which is now a nationalized memorial museum.