Leo Tolstoy

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was one of the most significant Russian writers and thinkers. A participant in the defense of Sevastopol, an educator, publicist, and in the final years of his life the founder of a new religious and moral teaching—Tolstoyanism. Count.

The ideas of nonviolent resistance that L. N. Tolstoy expressed in the work The Kingdom of God Is Within You profoundly influenced such important figures of the twentieth century as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

The Tolstoy Countly Line Leo Nikolayevich belonged to a wealthy and distinguished family that occupied an eminent position already in the time of Peter I. His great-grandfather, Count Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy, played a grim role in the history of Tsarevich Alexei. Pyotr Andreyevich’s great-grandson, Ilya Andreyevich, is depicted in War and Peace in the person of the kind-hearted, impractical old Count Rostov. Ilya Andreyevich’s son, Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy (1794—1837), was the father of Leo Nikolayevich. He is portrayed quite close to reality in Childhood and Boyhood in the person of Nikolinka’s father, and in part in War and Peace in the person of Nikolai Rostov. As a lieutenant colonel in the Pavlograd Hussar Regiment, he took part in the war of 1812 and, after the peace was concluded, retired from service. After spending his youth merrily, Nikolay Ilyich lost huge sums at cards and completely ruined his affairs. The passion for gambling passed to his son as well, who, already a famous writer, played recklessly and had to sell The Cossacks to Katkov in an accelerated manner in the early 1860s in order to pay off his losses. To put his shattered affairs in order, Nikolay Ilyich, like Nikolai Rostov, married an unattractive and no longer very young Princess Volkonskaya. The marriage was nevertheless a happy one. They had four sons: Nikolai, Sergei, Dmitry, and Lev, and a daughter, Maria.