Author · 1 summary
Russian novelist and short story writer
Leo Tolstoy was born into an old noble family on the Yasnaya Polyana estate, south of Moscow, and lost both parents as a child. He left Kazan University without a degree and served as an army officer, including in the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, which he described in his early sketches.
In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs and settled on his estate. There he wrote War and Peace (1869), a vast novel of Russian families during Napoleon's invasion, and Anna Karenina (1878). Anna Karenina sets the story of a married woman who leaves her husband for an officer against that of Levin, a landowner who searches for a meaningful life. It argues that society punishes passion unequally and that happiness lies in work, family and faith more than in romance.
In his fifties a spiritual crisis led him to a radical Christianity built on nonviolence and simple living. Those ideas later influenced Gandhi, and the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1901. At 82 he left home in secret and died days later at a railway station.
Anna Karenina is Leo Tolstoy's novel about a married woman in Russian high society who leaves her husband for Count Vronsky, set against Levin's search for meaning on his country estate. For readers who want the plot part by part and the ideas behind it.
New books, occasionally
