76 Facts About Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901,1902, and 1909; the fact that he never won is a major controversy.

Leo Tolstoy first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, and Sevastopol Sketches, based upon his experiences in the Crimean War.

Leo Tolstoy's fiction includes dozens of short stories such as "After the Ball", and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness and Hadji Murad.

Leo Tolstoy became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George, which he incorporated into his writing, particularly Resurrection.

The first documented members of the Leo Tolstoy family lived during the 17th century, thus Pyotr Leo Tolstoy himself is generally considered the founder of the noble house, being granted the title of count by Peter the Great.

Leo Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate 12 kilometres southwest of Tula, and 200 kilometres south of Moscow.

Leo Tolstoy was the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, a veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812, and Princess Mariya Tolstaya.

Leo Tolstoy's mother died when he was two and his father when he was nine.

Leo Tolstoy left the university in the middle of his studies, returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent much time in Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg, leading a lax and leisurely lifestyle.

Leo Tolstoy began writing during this period, including his first novel Childhood, a fictitious account of his own youth, which was published in 1852.

Leo Tolstoy was appalled by the number of deaths involved in warfare, and left the army after the end of the Crimean War.

Leo Tolstoy later instilled the concept in Mahatma Gandhi through his A Letter to a Hindu when young Gandhi corresponded with him seeking his advice.

Leo Tolstoy reviewed Proudhon's forthcoming publication, La Guerre et la Paix, and later used the title for his masterpiece.

Leo Tolstoy described the schools' principles in his 1862 essay "The School at Yasnaya Polyana".

The death of his brother Nikolay in 1860 had an impact on Leo Tolstoy, and led him to a desire to marry.

On 23 September 1862, Leo Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, who was sixteen years his junior and the daughter of a court physician.

Leo Tolstoy was called Sonya, the Russian diminutive of Sofia, by her family and friends.

Leo Tolstoy would continue editing War and Peace and had to have clean final drafts to be delivered to the publisher.

Leo Tolstoy's son, Count Lev Lvovich Leo Tolstoy, settled in Sweden and married a Swedish woman.

Leo Tolstoy's last surviving grandchild, Countess Tatiana Tolstoy-Paus, died in 2007 at Herresta manor in Sweden, which is owned by Tolstoy's descendants.

Ilya Leo Tolstoy's great-grandson, Pyotr Leo Tolstoy, is a well-known Russian journalist and TV presenter as well as a State Duma deputy since 2016.

Leo Tolstoy is considered one of the giants of Russian literature; his works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina and novellas such as Hadji Murad and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Leo Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastopol Sketches.

Somewhat surprisingly, Leo Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel.

Leo Tolstoy thought that Anna Karenina was his first true novel.

Leo Tolstoy explores and explains the economic philosophy of Georgism, of which he had become a very strong advocate towards the end of his life.

Leo Tolstoy tried writing poetry, with several soldier songs written during his military service, and fairy tales in verse such as Volga-bogatyr and Oaf stylized as national folk songs.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who died thirty years before Leo Tolstoy, admired and was delighted by Leo Tolstoy's novels.

In Chapter VI of Confession, Leo Tolstoy quoted the final paragraph of Schopenhauer's work.

Leo Tolstoy was struck by the description of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu ascetic renunciation as being the path to holiness.

In 1884, Leo Tolstoy wrote a book called What I Believe, in which he openly confessed his Christian beliefs.

Leo Tolstoy affirmed his belief in Jesus Christ's teachings and was particularly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount, and the injunction to turn the other cheek, which he understood as a "commandment of non-resistance to evil by force" and a doctrine of pacifism and nonviolence.

Leo Tolstoy received letters from American Quakers who introduced him to the non-violence writings of Quaker Christians such as George Fox, William Penn, and Jonathan Dymond.

Later, various versions of "Leo Tolstoy's Bible" were published, indicating the passages Leo Tolstoy most relied on, specifically, the reported words of Jesus himself.

Leo Tolstoy believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner perfection through following the Great Commandment of loving one's neighbor and God, rather than guidance from the Church or state.

Leo Tolstoy believed that the aristocracy was a burden on the poor.

Maxim Gorky relates how Leo Tolstoy once read this passage before him and Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy was moved to tears by the end of the reading.

Leo Tolstoy had a profound influence on the development of Christian anarchist thought.

Leo Tolstoy believed being a Christian required him to be a pacifist; the apparently inevitable waging of war by governments is why he is considered a philosophical anarchist.

Leo Tolstoy describes the state as the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force.

Leo Tolstoy makes a searching criticism of the prejudices which are current now concerning the benefits conferred upon men by the church, the state, and the existing distribution of property, and from the teachings of Jesus he deduces the rule of non-resistance and the absolute condemnation of all wars.

In hundreds of essays over the last 20 years of his life, Leo Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of the state and recommended books by Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, while rejecting anarchism's espousal of violent revolutionary means.

In 1908, Leo Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu outlining his belief in non-violence as a means for India to gain independence from colonial rule.

Leo Tolstoy wrote to Tolstoy seeking proof that he was the author, which led to further correspondence.

Leo Tolstoy was a famous sinophile, and read the works of Confucius and Lao Zi.

Leo Tolstoy corresponded with the Chinese intellectual Gu Hongming and recommended that China remain an agrarian nation, and not reform like Japan.

Leo Tolstoy denounced the intervention by the Eight-Nation Alliance in the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Filipino-American War, and the Second Boer War.

Leo Tolstoy praised the Boxer Rebellion and harshly criticized the atrocities of the Russian, German, American, Japanese, and other troops of the Eight-Nation alliance.

Leo Tolstoy described the intervention as "terrible for its injustice and cruelty".

Leo Tolstoy was impressed by the pacifist beliefs of the Doukhobors and brought their persecution to the attention of the international community, after they burned their weapons in peaceful protest in 1895.

Leo Tolstoy provided inspiration to the Mennonites, another religious group with anti-government and anti-war sentiments.

In 1904, Leo Tolstoy condemned the ensuing Russo-Japanese War and wrote to the Japanese Buddhist priest Soyen Shaku in a failed attempt to make a joint pacifist statement.

Towards the end of his life, Leo Tolstoy become occupied with the economic theory and social philosophy of Georgism.

Leo Tolstoy incorporated it approvingly into works such as Resurrection, the book that was a major cause for his excommunication.

Leo Tolstoy was introduced to hunting through his father who was an avid huntsman.

Leo Tolstoy was trained to hunt from a young age and became a passionate huntsman himself.

Leo Tolstoy was known to shoot duck, quail, snipe, woodcock and otters.

Leo Tolstoy spent decades hunting animals but stopped sometime in the 1880s and became a staunch opponent of hunting due to ethical concerns about killing.

In 1890, Leo Tolstoy wrote a preface for Vladimir Chertkov's anti-hunting pamphlet Zlaia zabava: Mysli ob okhote.

Leo Tolstoy first became interested in vegetarianism in 1882 but his conversion to a vegetarian diet was a long and gradual process.

In 1887, Leo Tolstoy was lapsing from a vegetarian diet by occasionally eating meat.

Listovsky suggested that Leo Tolstoy's writing talent went into decline after he adopted a meatless diet.

Leo Tolstoy became a vegetarian for ethical and spiritual reasons, associating a meatless diet with "high moral views on life".

In 1891, Leo Tolstoy obtained a copy of Howard Williams's book The Ethics of Diet from Chertkov.

Leo Tolstoy's daughters translated the book into Russian and Tolstoy wrote an introductory essay titled "The First Step", published in 1893.

Whilst on his vegetarian diet, Leo Tolstoy was eating eggs daily but was questioned by one of his friends if eating eggs amounts to taking life.

Leo Tolstoy died on 20 November, 1910 at the age of 82.

Leo Tolstoy's secretive departure was an apparent attempt to escape from his wife's tirades.

Leo Tolstoy spoke out against many of his teachings, and in recent years had grown envious of his attention to Tolstoyan "disciples".

Leo Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo railway station, after a day's train journey south.

In 1944, literary historian and Soviet medievalist Nikolai Gudzii wrote a biography of Leo Tolstoy that spanned 80 pages.

The discrepancies in Eikenbaum's portrayals of Leo Tolstoy can be attributed to the political pressure in Soviet Russia at the time: public officials pressured literary scholars to conform with party doctrine.

Originally Leo Tolstoy wanted to make the Russian people the heirs to his writings, but Russian law at the time decreed that property could only be inherited by one individual.

However, publishing a complete collection of Leo Tolstoy's works proved to be more difficult.

Vladimir Lenin wrote several essays about Leo Tolstoy, suggesting that a contradiction exists within his critique of Russian society.

For both Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy, truth is God, and since God is universal love, truth must therefore be universal love.