[5][6] Born to an aristocratic family, Tolstoy achieved acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (1852–1856), and with Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War.

[3][4] His oeuvre includes short stories such as "Alyosha the Pot" (1905) and "After the Ball" (1911) and novellas such as Family Happiness (1859), The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Hadji Murad (1912).

[2] His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi,[8] Martin Luther King Jr.,[9] James Bevel,[10] and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

[15][16] Because of the pagan names and the fact that Chernigov at the time was ruled by Demetrius I Starshy, some researchers concluded that they were Lithuanians who arrived from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

[21] Tolstoy left the university in the middle of his studies,[21] returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent much time in Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg, leading a lax and leisurely lifestyle.

Tolstoy's political philosophy was also influenced by a March 1861 visit to French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels.

[30] Even so, their early married life was happy and allowed Tolstoy much freedom and the support system to compose War and Peace and Anna Karenina, with Sonya acting as his secretary, editor, and financial manager.

[39] 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.

Tolstoy's earliest works, the autobiographical novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the chasm between himself and his peasants.

Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.

Vladimir Nabokov heaped superlatives upon The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina; he questioned, however, the reputation of War and Peace and sharply criticized Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata.

[13] After reading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Tolstoy gradually became converted to the ascetic morality upheld in that work as the proper spiritual path for the upper classes.

After reading passages such as the following, which abound in Schopenhauer's ethical chapters, the Russian nobleman chose poverty and formal denial of the will: But this very necessity of involuntary suffering (by poor people) for eternal salvation is also expressed by that utterance of the Savior (Matthew 19:24): "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

He 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.

[56] 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.

[57] He opposed private land ownership and the institution of marriage, and valued chastity and sexual abstinence (discussed in Father Sergius and his preface to The Kreutzer Sonata), ideals also held by the young Gandhi.

He 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.

[61]In hundreds of essays over the last 20 years of his life, 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.

[82][83] In 1904, 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.

[90] Resurrection, in which the nobleman Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov realizes that the earth cannot really be owned and that everyone should have equal access to its resources and advantages, hints that Tolstoy had such a view.

[95] In 1890 Tolstoy wrote a preface for Vladimir Chertkov's anti-hunting pamphlet Zlaia zabava: Mysli ob okhote (An Evil Pastime: Thoughts about Hunting).

[100] In a letter to A. D. Zutphen (a Dutch medical student), Tolstoy wrote that "My health not only has not suffered; it has in fact improved significantly since I have given up milk, butter and eggs, as well as sugar, tea, and coffee.

[108] At around the same time, literary scholar and historian Boris Eikhenbaum – in a stark contrast from his earlier works on Tolstoy – portrayed the Russian novelist as someone whose ideas aligned with those of early utopian socialists, such as Robert Owen and Henri Saint-Simon.

[110] While Tolstoy himself never associated with the movement, as he was opposed to joining any organization or group, he named his thirteenth child Alexandra (Sasha) L'vovna Tolstaya the heir to his works with the intention that she would publish them for the Russian people.

In December 1918, the Commissariat of Education granted Chertkov a 10 million rouble subsidy to publish a complete edition of his works, which never materialized due to government control of publication rights.

[110] The Soviet government owned the estate, which was deemed a memorial for the late Russian writer, but Alexandra had jurisdiction over the education offered at Yasnaya Polyana.

[110] During the Jubilee Celebration, Anatoly Luncharsky – the head of the People's Commissariat for Education – gave a speech in which he denied reports that claimed the Soviet government was hostile towards Tolstoy and his legacy.

According to Lenin, Tolstoy – who adored the peasantry and voiced their discontent with imperial Russian society – may have been revolutionary in his critiques but his political consciousness was not fully developed for a revolution.

[112] Additionally, Lenin thought Tolstoy's concept of non-resistance to evil hindered the 1905 revolution's success because the movement was not militant and had thus allowed the autocracy to crush them.

There have been other films about the writer, including Departure of a Grand Old Man, made in 1912 just two years after his death, How Fine, How Fresh the Roses Were (1913), and Lev Tolstoy, directed by and starring Sergei Gerasimov in 1984.