Portrait of Leo Tolstoy

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Portrait of Leo Tolstoy

1887

by Ilya Repin

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, vegetarian, moral thinker and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.