Lev Tolstoy
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.
“Selv om det ingen gjester var, var Anna like opptatt med seg selv som ellers og dessuten svært opptatt av å lese - både romaner og alvorlige bøker, slike som var på mote nå. Hun bestilte alle de bøkene som ble rosende omtalt i de utenlandske avisene og tidsskriftene hun mottok, og pløyet dem igjennom med den oppmerksomhet for det man leser som man bare finner hos mennesker i ensomhet.”
“No, pardon me, I consider myself and people like me aristocrats: people who can point back to three or four honourable generations of their family, all with a high standard of education (talent and intelligence are a different matter), who have never cringed before anyone, never depended on anyone, but have lived as my father and my grandfather did. I know many such. You consider it mean for me to count the trees in my wood while you give Ryabinin thirty thousand roubles; but you will receive a Goernment grant and I don't know what other award, and I shan't, so I value what is mine by birth and labour... We - and not those who only manage to exist by the bounty of the mighty of this world, and who can be bought for a piece of silver - are the aristocrats.-Levin”
“I ask only one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now; but if even that is impossible, command me to disappear and I will do it.-Vronsky”
“- Every girl is proud of an offer- Yes, every girl, but not she”