Leo Tolstoy or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a
Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and
Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century
Russian life and attitudes, the
peak of realist fiction. Tolstoy'
s further talents as essayist, dramatist, and educational reformer made him the most influential member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family. 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 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 Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
"All violence consists in some
people forcing others, under threat of suffering or
death, to do what they do not want to do." - Leo Tolstoy
"
Boredom: the desire for desires." - Leo Tolstoy
