Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828 to 1910) was a Russian writer, regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time, whose moral and political writings also made him a social thinker. After a moral crisis in the 1870s, outlined in his Confession of 1882, he took a literal reading of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centred on the Sermon on the Mount, and became a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, set out in The Kingdom of God Is Within You of 1894, had a profound impact on Mahatma Gandhi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel, and he was a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George. His anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. Born to an old aristocratic family, he is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina.