Leo Tolstoy

Russian · 1828–1910

Russian aristocrat-turned-moralist whose two huge novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are usually filed alongside Dostoevsky's as the twin peaks of nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Where Dostoevsky drills into the fevered interior of a single character, Tolstoy sets his cameras wider — families, regiments, estates, whole societies. His later years were taken up with a stringent Christian anarchism that influenced Gandhi and alienated his own family.

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