Count Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in Yasnaya
Polyana, Russia. Orphaned at nine, he was brought up by an elderly
aunt and educated by French tutors until he matriculated at Kazan
University in 1844. In 1847, he gave up his studies and, after
several aimless years, volunteered for military duty in the army,
serving as a junior officer in the Crimean War before retiring in
1857. In 1862, Tolstoy married Sophie Behrs, a marriage that was to
become, for him, bitterly unhappy. His diary, started in 1847, was
used for self-study and self-criticism; it served as the source
from which he drew much of the material that appeared not only in
his great novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna
Karenina (1877), but also in his shorter works. Seeking
religious justification for his life, Tolstoy evolved a new
Christianity based upon his own interpretation of the Gospels.
Yasnaya Polyana became a mecca for his many converts At the age of
eighty-two, while away from home, the writer suffered a break down
in his health in Astapovo, Riazan, and he died there on November
20, 1910.
Hugh McLean has published widely on Russian literature. Regina
Marler is the author of Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the
Bloomsbury Boom and editor of Selected Letters of Vanessa
Bell. She also writes for the New York Times Book Review
and the Los Angeles Times. Marler lives in San Francisco.
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