War's lieutenant became the century's prophet of peace
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) turned Sevastopol's siege into fiction, then wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. A spiritual crisis made him a Christian anarchist whose nonviolence shaped Gandhi and King—yet the Nobel prizes that courted him never arrived.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, about twelve kilometers from Tula and two hundred from Moscow, fourth of five children. His mother died when he was two, his father when he was nine. After an indifferent spell at Kazan University he gambled heavily, joined the army in the Caucasus, and served as an artillery officer through the eleven-month Sevastopol siege of 1854–55, earning a lieutenancy and lifelong horror at war's body count. Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–56) and Sevastopol Sketches (1855) made his name before the great novels of 1869, 1878, and 1899.
European trips sealed his politics. A public execution in Paris in 1857 convinced him the state corrupted citizens; he later told Vasily Botkin he would never serve any government. In Brussels he met Proudhon, reviewed a French work titled War and Peace, and borrowed the name. Back home after the 1861 emancipation he opened thirteen peasant schools at Yasnaya Polyana—short-lived under police pressure, yet ancestors of democratic education. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs, sixteen years younger; eight of thirteen children survived. She copied endless drafts while their marriage later cracked over his renunciation of wealth and copyrights.
The 1870s brought moral crisis and Confession (1882). Literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount made him a pacifist Christian anarchist; The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) shaped Gandhi's politics and later inspired Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as civil-rights organizers including Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel. He also embraced Henry George's Georgism in Resurrection. Nominated for the literature Nobel every year from 1902 to 1906 and for peace in 1901, 1902, and 1909, he never won—a lasting controversy. Virginia Woolf called him the greatest of all novelists; Gary Saul Morson called War and Peace the greatest novel.
Source: Leo Tolstoy
