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Tolstoy (Толстой) Lev Nikolaevich
(1828—1910)

Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate situated in the region of Tula, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in his family. His parents died when he was young, so he was brought up by relatives. Tolstoy studied law and Oriental languages at Kazan University in 1844, but never earned a degree. He returned in the middle of his studies to Yasnaya Polyana, and spent much of his time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. After contracting heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy accompanied his elder brother to the Caucasus in 1851 and joined the Russian Army. Tolstoy began writing literature around this time. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, and together they had thirteen children. His marriage has been described by A.N.Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history, and was marked from the outset by Tolstoy on the eve of his marriage giving his diaries to his fiancee. These detailed Tolstoy's sexual relations with his serfs. His relationship with his wife further deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical.

Tolstoy was one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature. His most famous works include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and many shorter works, including the novellas The Death of Ivan Ilych and Hadji Murad. His autobiographical novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, his first publications (1852â€“1856), tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the differences between him and his peasant playmates. Although in later life Tolstoy rejected these books as sentimental, a great deal of his own life is revealed, and the books still have relevance for their telling of the universal story of growing up. Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastapol Sketches. His experiences in battle helped develop his pacifism, and gave him material for realistic depiction of the horrors of war in his later work. His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. The Cossacks (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. Anna Karenina (1867) tells parallel stories of a woman trapped by the conventions of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside his serfs in the fields and seeks to reform their lives. Tolstoy not only drew from his experience of life but created characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection. War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. It was written with the purpose of exploring Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel (nor did he consider any of the great Russian fictions written up that time to be novels). This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy was a novelist of the Realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in middle class life. War and Peace (which is really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that Anna Karenina was his first true novel, and it is indeed one of the greatest of all realist novels. After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1884) and What Then Must We Do? develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Orthodox church

Abkhazia, 2002, Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev

Bosnia & Herzegovina (Serb administration), 2003, Lev Tolstoy

Bulgaria, 1978, Lev Tolstoy

Czechoslovakia, 1953, Lev Tolstoy

Finland, 2013, Krista Kosonen as Anna Karenina

France, 1978, Lev Tolstoy

Great Britain. Staffa, 1982, Lev Tolstoy

Guinea, 2001, «Anna Karenin»

Guinea, 2008, Lev Tolstoy

Guinea, 2012, Stamps with writers

Guyana, 1999, Death of Lev Tolstoy and Mark Twain

Hungary, 1948, Lev Tolstoy