What Is Leo Tolstoy Famous For? The Count Who Wrote War and Peace and Then Questioned Everything

Leo Tolstoy is famous above all for two novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), which are regularly named among the greatest books ever written. He is also famous for what he did afterwards. In middle age, at the height of his success, he went through a moral crisis, rejected much of his aristocratic life, wrote fiercely about nonviolence, was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church, and influenced Mahatma Gandhi. Few writers have been both a towering artist and a moral troublemaker on this scale.

This article follows that double life, from a careless young count to a bearded prophet who died at a small railway station, and finishes with some English phrases his stories make easy to remember.

An orphan on a country estate

Tolstoy was born on 9 September 1828 (28 August in the old Russian calendar) at Yasnaya Polyana, his family's estate about 12 kilometres south-west of Tula. He was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Tolstoy and Princess Mariya Volkonskaya. His mother died when he was two and his father when he was nine, and he was raised by relatives.

Yasnaya Polyana would stay at the centre of his life. He wrote his great novels there, ran schools there, and is buried there.

A poor student and a gambling soldier

In 1844 he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University. His teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn", and he left without a degree. The young count drank, gambled and ran up debts. In 1851, after heavy gambling losses, he followed his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army.

War made him a writer. He served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War and was in Sevastopol during the eleven-month siege of 1854–55. His Sevastopol Sketches (1855) described the siege with a frankness that readers had not seen before, and his semi-autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (1852–1856) had already made his name.

A trip to Europe in 1857 left a deep mark. In Paris he watched a public execution, an experience that stayed with him for the rest of his life and fed his later hostility to state violence.

Teacher of peasant children

After the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861, Tolstoy founded 13 schools for peasant children and wrote about their principles in an essay, "The School at Yasnaya Polyana" (1862). His idea was that children learn best when they are free and curious, not drilled. It is an attitude many modern language teachers would recognise.

In September 1862 he married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, who was sixteen years younger than he was. They had thirteen children, eight of whom survived childhood. Sophia was far more than a wife in the background. She copied his manuscripts by hand, including War and Peace, and acted as his editor and business manager. Given the length of his drafts and the difficulty of his handwriting, that was a monumental task.

War and Peace: a book that refused to be a novel

War and Peace, published in full in 1869, follows several aristocratic families through the years of Napoleon's wars with Russia, including the French invasion of 1812. It contains about 580 characters, some invented and some historical. Tolstoy himself did not think of it as a novel; he called it an epic in prose.

What makes it remarkable is the way it moves between scales: from a ballroom to a battlefield, from a young woman's first dance to long reflections on whether great men really make history. For Tolstoy, history was shaped by countless ordinary decisions rather than by the will of a single genius like Napoleon. That idea still provokes historians today.

Anna Karenina and the famous first line

Anna Karenina appeared in instalments between 1875 and 1877, mostly in the magazine The Russian Messenger, and as a book in 1878. It opens with one of the best-known sentences in literature: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The novel has two main stories. Anna, a married woman in high society, begins an affair with the cavalry officer Count Vronsky, is shut out by society, and ends her life under a train. In parallel, the landowner Konstantin Levin courts Kitty, struggles with farming and marriage, and searches for faith. Levin is often read as a partial self-portrait of Tolstoy. Dostoevsky called the book artistically perfect, and Nabokov counted it among the greatest love stories in world literature.

The crisis: "What is the meaning of my life?"

Around the time he finished Anna Karenina, Tolstoy went through a deep moral crisis. He had fame, money, land and a large family, and none of it seemed to answer the question of why he should live. He described the crisis and his spiritual awakening in A Confession (1882).

What came out of it was a radical, personal reading of Christianity centred on the Sermon on the Mount: love your enemies and do not answer violence with violence. In The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) he argued for nonviolent resistance to the state. He became a strict vegetarian from 1890, supported the land-tax ideas of the American economist Henry George, and renounced the copyrights on many of his earlier works, which caused painful conflict with Sophia. His later novel Resurrection (1899) attacked the Church and the justice system so sharply that it was a major cause of his excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.

He kept writing fiction too. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), a short novel about an ordinary judge facing death, is still one of the most widely read works in Russian literature.

Letters to Gandhi

In 1908 Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, arguing that India could win independence through nonviolence. The following year a young lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, read it and wrote to Tolstoy, beginning a correspondence that lasted until Tolstoy's death. Gandhi credited The Kingdom of God Is Within You with convincing him of nonviolent resistance and called Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced." He even named a community in South Africa after him.

Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Peace Prize three times, but never won; in 1906 he even asked for his name to be kept out.

Death at Astapovo

In November 1910, at the age of 82, Tolstoy set out from home by train. He fell ill and died of pneumonia on 20 November at Astapovo, a small railway station, where the stationmaster had taken him into his own home. Around two thousand people attended his funeral, and he was buried at Yasnaya Polyana. In the Soviet Union more than 400 million copies of his works were printed, making him the best-selling author there.

So what is Tolstoy famous for? For novels that show whole lives with startling honesty, and for refusing, late in life, to stop asking whether his own life was honest. Both halves are still worth reading.

Learn with Tolstoy: English for big questions

Tolstoy's novels and his crisis are full of ideas that come up in serious English conversation. These phrases help you talk about them:

Phrase	What it means	Example
a turning point	a moment when things change direction	Moving abroad was a turning point in my life.
to have second thoughts	to start doubting a decision	I'm having second thoughts about the job offer.
to give something up	to stop doing or owning something	He gave up meat for ethical reasons.
to make sense of	to understand something confusing	I'm still trying to make sense of the ending.
in its own way	in a particular, individual manner	Every language is difficult in its own way.

Try this: Rewrite Tolstoy's famous first line about something you know well, using in its own way. For example: "All good teachers are alike; every bad lesson is boring in its own way." Then write two more sentences explaining your version.