Aleksei Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into the Russian aristocracy, spent his youth in aimless dissolution, and joined the army in a bid to escape his gambling debts. Sevastopol Tales, based on his experience serving as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, helped to establish his fame as a writer in the 1850s. The war helped transform him into a passionate pacifist and social agitator, and his sense of moral purpose inspired his writing throughout his long life. He started a series of schools for the recently emancipated serfs of Russia, and published a number of literary masterpieces, most famously the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Living in retirement on his ancestral estate, he gradually became a near-messianic figure, receiving literary, political and spiritual pilgrims, both lauded and persecuted by the Russian authorities. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prizes in Literature and Peace, but never won.