Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, known in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer from an aristocratic family who lived from 1828 to 1910. He wrote War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection, long novels often counted among the finest ever written, along with the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. After a moral crisis in the 1870s he took the ethics of Jesus literally, and his essays on nonviolent resistance, such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.