The Russian novelist and moral philosopher Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) ranks as one of the world’s great writers, and his “War and Peace” has been called the greatest novel ever written.
Although he was born into nobility, Tolstoy spent much of his life as a champion of Russia’s peasant class, notably in the field of education.
He began his literary career in the 1850s, publishing a trilogy about his own life: Childhood (Detstvo, 1852), Boyhood (Otrochestvo, 1854) and Youth (Yunost’, 1857).