TOLSTOY

He was born into a wealthy family on September 9, 1828, in the Yasnaya Polyana Estate in Tula, near Moscow. He lost his mother at the age of two and his father at the age of nine and was raised by relatives. He entered Kazan University in 1844, but due to his reaction to official education, he decided to return to Yasnaya Polyana in 1847 and educate himself. He joined the army in 1852, where he began writing in his spare time. By 1857, he completed his three-volume autobiographical novel titled Childhood, Youth and Youth.
Tolstoy, who participated in the Crimean War in 1854, wrote Sevastopol based on his experiences there. In 1857, he went on his first European trip, covering France, Italy and Switzerland, and collected information about educational institutions. On his return to Russia, he opened a school for peasant children. He wrote his novel Family Happiness in 1859. In 1860, he went on a trip to Europe again and deepened his research on educational institutions in Germany, France, England and Italy. During this period, his own moral philosophy began to take shape. He married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. He started writing War and Peace, which he started writing in 1863 and is considered his masterpiece, and completed it in 1869. Encouraged by the novel's success, he wrote his second major novel, Anna Karenina, between 1873 and 1877.
Starting from 1880, he began to write books in which he would criticize the state and the church and formed the building blocks of Tolstoyism. He published The Death of Ivan Ilyich in 1886 and Kroycher Sonata in 1889. He wrote The Master and His Servant in 1895. In the same year, he began writing his last major novel, Resurrection, in which he criticized the Church heavily; The novel, published in 1899, led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church.
He started writing his last novel, Hacı Murat, in 1896; The work he completed in 1904 would only be published after his death. After 1900, Tolstoy devoted most of his time to writing articles expressing his views on religion, society, morality and art. During this period, he became famous not only as a writer but also as a spiritual and moral leader. In order to ensure consistency between his life and his ideas, he began to live a simpler life. First, he quit drinking and tobacco and started dressing like peasants, then he decided to leave his property to the peasants after his death.
He fell out with his family, especially his wife, because of his radical ideas on property. This disagreement caused him to spend his last years in increasing psychological distress. In the autumn of 1910, when he could no longer bear the conditions he was in, he left home, taking his little daughter and his doctor with him, and after a while, on November 20, he died of pneumonia in Astapovo. His body was buried in Yasnaya Polyana two days later, in a ceremony attended by thousands of people.