Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828 – November 20,1910) was born to a noble Russian family. His parents died when he was a still a boy. Relatives raised him, and he was wealthy and free to live the dissolute life of a young man of society in Moscow and St. Petersburg. After gambling away a small fortune he left for the Caucasus to fight in the Crimean War. In the Caucasus Tolstoy, a failed student without any evident promise, began to write. After completing several brilliant shorter works, Tolstoy married and settled down at his family’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and began his masterpiece, War and Peace.

Tolstoy led a life with as broad an intellectual, philosophical and spiritual horizon as the vast spaces recounted in his books. He also led a life that wilfully indentured itself to the land and the deep down physical realities of manual labor. Was any artist so gifted and so tortured by the anomalies and incongruities of life? Was any artist more capable of reproducing life in writing, perhaps because he was so in touch with life’s maddening mysteries.

Tolstoy’s growth as a novelist might be less interesting than his spiritual growth, since he was deemed a fully formed genius from the publication his very first works. However, his spiritual growth from the dissolute young man to the spiritual anarchist of his latter days, who attempted to live in literal compliance with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, was long, fevered and ultimately painful. His marriage, which had begun in sunlight and favor, dissolved in bitterness and recriminations, and at the age of 82 and in poor health he left Yasnaya Polyana only to die from pneumonia in a railway station.  Leo Tolstoy was a giant among men whose person encompassed an entire spectrum. He was irascible and kind, brilliant and stubborn, a glutton and an ascetic, spiritual but of the earth. His influence on writers as well as social activists like Ghandi and Martin Luther King remains immeasurable.