Leo Tolstoy: The Biography

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” (Leo Tolstoy)

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is the Russian great author, social reformist, moral thinker, pacifist and the church anarchist. He was born in Yasnaya Polsyana, 9 September 1828 in the high social class family. He is the last child from four brothers. His mother passed away when he was three years old. Seven years later, his father was gone. Automatically, he and his brothers became the orphan. Afterward, their nurture was on their aunties.

Educating by his Germaine and France teacher, he taught privately. In sixty years old he studied at Kazan University to learn oriental languages, but he moved to the law study. Because of his boredom, he decided to leave his study in 1847.

In 1851, he followed her oldest brother in Caucasus to join the Russian army and fought in the Crimean War. While he was on the war, he wrote autobiographical works, Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1856). Those works tells the life of a son of wealthy landowner who realize the difference between him and his friends from the farmer class. The works represent the Tolstoy’s thought. In the 1856, Tolstoy moved to Saint Petersburg and became a farmer. He established a school for peasant children there.

In 1862, he married Sofia Behrs, an upper class girl in Moscow and gradually abandoned his involvement with the school. The next fifteen years he devoted to managing his estate, raising his and Sofia’s large family. In this time he wrote two major works: War and Peace (1865-1867), the historical epic that draws the event of Napoleon subjection and Russian empire, and Anna Karenina (1875-1877), a tragedy novel which tells love affair of married woman from the Russian high society.

Year after year, Tolstoy felt increasingly disenchanted with the teaching of Russian orthodox church which coercive. He held the pacifist principle that against the violence. Indeed, he opposed the corruption in Russia estate. Those ideas was poured in The Kingdom of God is within You (1894).  The principle to against the violence and against the oppression was inspired Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Moreover, his thoughts still inspire the movement organization around the world. In other side, his idea brought to the conflict between him and the government and the church. In spite of his changes, he continued to write his works, such as the play The Power of Darkness (1886), the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), the novels The Kreutzer Sonata (1891), Ressurrection (199) and Hadji Murad (1896-1904, published 1912).

In 1910, still unable to reconcile the differences between the life and aristocracy and the simpler existence he craved, he left his estate. He soon fell ill and was found dead on a hut in a remote railway station. He was buried on his estate at Yasnaya Polsyana.