Count, soldier, and supreme realist novelist, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) produced War and Peace and Anna Karenina — two novels of epic scale and piercing psychological depth that many regard as the greatest of the nineteenth century. In midlife he underwent a spiritual crisis and emerged a radical Christian moralist who preached nonviolence, rejected the Orthodox Church, and came to view his own fiction with suspicion. The Church excommunicated him in 1901. His doctrine of nonviolent resistance directly shaped Mohandas Gandhi. He died in 1910 at a remote railway station, a fugitive from his own home.
An old man in a peasant's smock walks the fields of his own estate behind a plough, a count who has given away his copyrights and longs to give away his land. He is one of the most famous writers alive, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and he has come to believe that art itself is a kind of vanity. His wife, who bore his many children and copied out War and Peace by hand, fights him bitterly over the money and the will, while he preaches that property is sin. In 1901 the Russian Orthodox Church casts him out. In the autumn of 1910, at eighty-two, he flees his home in the night to live at last as he has preached, falls ill within days, and dies at a small railway station with reporters gathered outside. The prophet who renounced everything and the count who could not quite leave it were the same restless man.