Russian novelist, moral philosopher, and Christian anarchist whose late religious turn made him, alongside his novelistic achievement, one of the 19th century's most consequential political thinkers. The author of War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) — two of the indispensable novels of the European tradition — Tolstoy in middle age underwent a crisis of meaning that he described in A Confession (1882), concluded that the Russian Orthodox Church and European civilization had betrayed the teachings of Jesus, and spent the last thirty years of his life as an increasingly radical Christian pacifist, vegetarian, ascetic, and anarchist living on his Yasnaya Polyana estate in a performed peasant simplicity.
His late religious writings — What I Believe (1884), The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), The Gospel in Brief (1881) — read the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus's literal political program: do not resist evil by force, do not swear oaths, do not judge, do not kill. From these premises Tolstoy derived a thoroughgoing rejection of the state, the military, the courts, the established church, and private property — an anarcho-pacifism that excommunicated him from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 and gave the next century's nonviolent movements their vocabulary. A young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi, reading The Kingdom of God Is Within You in South Africa in 1894, later wrote that the book "overwhelmed me" and opened the correspondence that became one of the germinal exchanges of 20th-century political thought. Through Gandhi the line runs to King; Dorothy Day read Tolstoy closely; so did Merton.
Tolstoy died at eighty-two in the waiting room of a provincial train station, having finally left Yasnaya Polyana in the middle of a winter night to live out his convictions in poverty. The flight made him, for the international press, the most famous man in the world at the moment of his death.