Leo Tolstoy Biography

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer that wrote mostly wrote short stories, and novels and near the future wrote plays and essays. Tolstoy is mostly known for his novel war and peace and Anna Karenina. These two books were considered two of the greatest novels of all time in the realistic fiction genre. People did not only consider Tolstoy's novels as the greatest of all time but considered him as the greatest novelist of all time. Tolstoy is known for his paradoxical and complicated persona and also his moralistic views. People saw him as a moral thinker.

A little about Tolstoy was that he was born in Yashaya Polyana which is a family estate in the Tula region of Russia. The Tolstoy family were well known Russian nobles. When Tolstoy was younger his parents died so his old relatives took care of him and his siblings. Tolstoy learned oriental languages and studied law in Kazan University. He the left after being considered unable to learn and spent most of his time in Moscow and saint Petersburg. Later on 1851 Tolstoy went to the Caucasus with his brother and joined the army. Tolstoy started writing around the time he joined the army.

At the age of thirty four in September 1862, Tolstoy married one of his sisters friends Sofia Andreyevna Behrs. Tolstoy had 12 children in total with Sofia. The names of the children were Sergey, Tatiana, Ilya, Leo, Marya, Petya, Alexis, Andrey, Nucholas, Alexandra, Ivan, and Another daughter that was not named because of her death after her birth. Sofia was interested in Tolstoy's life and wanted to know all about him before they got married, so Tolstoy gave Sofia his diaries for her to read. Sofia was a very helpful asset in Tolstoy's writing career. Sofia had organized h...

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...y after death. What a happiness that it does not! What an anguish it would be if I remembered in this life all the evil, all that is painful to the conscience, committed by me in a previous life….What a happiness that reminiscences disappear with death and that there only remains consciousness".

Tolstoy intended on starting a new life and did so on 28 October 1910, making it as far as the stationmaster’s home at the Astapovo train station. Leo Tolstoy died there of pneumonia on 20 November 1910. Although he wanted no ceremony or ritual, thousands showed up to pay their respects. He was buried in a simple wooden coffin near Nikolay’s ‘place of the little green stick’ by the ravine in the Stary Zakaz Wood on the Yasnya Polyana estate; returned to that place of idylls where Nikolay told him one could find the secret to happiness and the end to all suffering.