Leo Tolstoi
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.
His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“tous les bonheurs se ressemblent, mais chaque infortune a sa physionomie particulière.”
“Jaschwin, ein Spieler und ein Trunkenbold, ein völlig grundsatzloser Mensch ohne Moral, war im Regiment Wronskijs bester Freund. Er mochte ihn wegen seiner unwahrscheinlichen körperlichen Konstitution, die sich hauptsächlich darin ausdrückte, daß er wie ein bodenloses Fass saufen und auf Schlaf verzichten konnte, ohne daß man ihm nur das geringste anmerkte.”
“There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.”