Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, where he spent most of his early years, together with his several brothers. In 1844 he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental Languages and later Law, but left before completing a degree. He spent the following years in a round of drinking, gambling and womanizing, until weary of his idle existence he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851.

He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sevastopol wrote The Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856 Tolstoy spent some time mixing with the literati in St Petersburg before traveling abroad and then settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. His marriage to Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862 marked the beginning of a period of contentment centred around family life; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy managed his vast estates, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote both his great novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877).

During the 1870s he underwent a spiritual crisis, the moral and religious ideas that had always dogged him coming to the fore. A Confession (1879¿82) marked an outward change in his life and works; he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and in a series of pamphlets written after 1880 he rejected church and state, indicted the demands of flesh, and denounced private property. His teachings earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, and also led finally to his excommunication by the Russian Holy Synod in 1901. In 1910 at the age of eighty-two he fled from home "leaving this worldly life in order to live out my last days in peace and solitude;" he died some days later at the station master's house at Astapovo.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Books LTD.

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Title: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: Anna Karenina (Pevear/Volokhonsky Translation), Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: Anna Karenina, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: Anna Karenina (Rosamund Bartlett Translation), Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: 9780141978222, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: War and Peace, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: A Very Russian Christmas: The Greatest Russian Holiday Stories of All Time, Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus, Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: War & Peace: {Complete & Illustrated}, Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: The Devil, Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: The Law of Love and The Law of Violence, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: A Confession And Other Religious Writings, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: Resurrection, Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: The Gospel in Brief, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: Sevastopol Sketches (Sebastopol Sketches), Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: War and Peace - The Original Classic Edition, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: The Death of Ivan Ilych, Author: Leo Tolstoy
Title: The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Title: Anna Karénine, Author: Leo Tolstoy
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