Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born a Russian count, inherited an estate with hundreds of serfs, and spent the second half of his life trying to give it all away. He wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina before he turned fifty — two of the largest novels in any language, both finished while he was managing a farm, raising thirteen children, and running a school for peasant boys on his own land. He was, by any measure, one of the most productive novelists who ever lived. He was also deeply convinced that novels were a moral problem, that art which didn’t serve truth was vanity, and that he himself was a hypocrite for having written them.

After a spiritual crisis that overtook him between the two great novels, Tolstoy renounced his copyrights, gave up his title, and attempted to live as a peasant — growing his own food, cobbling his own boots, walking away from the life his writing had made. He became a Christian anarchist who rejected the institutional church, opposed violence and the state, and wrote essays and parables that influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Wittgenstein. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1901. He kept writing anyway — not novels, mostly, but letters, diaries, and moral tracts that filled thirty volumes more.

He died in 1910 at a remote train station, having fled his estate at age eighty-two after a final break with his wife over his will and his copyrights. He had wanted to die simply. The quotes that survive him are not inspirational in the usual sense — they are diagnostic. They locate the problem, not the solution: in us, not out there. That is why they hold. Tolstoy had every advantage and spent his life indicting himself for it. When he wrote about simplicity, goodness, and truth, he was writing about the distance between what he believed and how he lived. That distance was the work.