Leo Tolstoy
Russian novelist, moral thinker and religious reformer (Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828–1910), born on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana into the Russian landed aristocracy, an army officer during the Crimean War before devoting himself to literature and producing, already as an established novelist, two of the most ambitious novels in the entire history of literature, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), masterworks of psychological and historical realism that earned him immediate worldwide recognition. Around the age of fifty, Tolstoy underwent a profound spiritual and existential crisis, narrated with disarming frankness in his Confession (1882), which led him to reject both his own earlier literary work and the aristocratic luxury of his life, and to develop a radically personal, rationalist, anticlerical Christianity centred exclusively on the ethical teachings of the Sermon on the Mount — especially the commandment not to resist evil with violence — openly rejecting both the divinity of Christ and the sacraments and institutional authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, which formally excommunicated him in 1901. His work The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) systematised a philosophy of nonviolent resistance and radical civil disobedience toward state and ecclesiastical power that would exert a decisive, direct and acknowledged influence on Mahatma Gandhi, with whom Tolstoy corresponded in his final years, and on Martin Luther King Jr. through Gandhi. Having become a genuine international moral authority in the last decades of his life, Tolstoy practised and preached a Christian anarchism advocating simple living, manual labour, vegetarianism and the renunciation of private property — a tension that brought him into dramatic conflict with his own family right to the end, when, at eighty-two, he secretly fled his home seeking a life of evangelical poverty and died a few days later at a remote railway station.