Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828 - 1910), usually known as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He received many nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature and for Nobel Peace Prize. The fact that he never won is a major controversy. He was born into an aristocratic Russian family although often struggled. He is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), often cited as the peak of realist fiction. He first came to literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), along with Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War. During the 1870s Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, which resulted in him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. This autobiography covers his youth from 1847 - 1852 and includes footnotes, which are linked to the end of the book.
Author
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
