50 Fun Facts About Leo Tolstoy

What was the name of the family estate where Tolstoy was born and spent most of his life?

Yasnaya Polyana. He asked to be buried in its woods, at the spot where his brother Nikolai said he had buried a green stick inscribed with the secret of making all people happy.

What aristocratic title did Tolstoy hold?

Count. The title first went to his ancestor Pyotr Tolstoy, the diplomat who tracked Peter the Great's runaway son Alexei to Naples and brought him back to Russia.

Which War and Peace heroine echoes Tolstoy's mother?

Marya Bolkonskaya. Tolstoy could not remember his mother, Princess Maria Volkonskaya, and not one portrait of her survived, so he had to imagine her, and the plain, good-hearted princess of the novel is thought to be the result.

Tolstoy left which university without a degree, after poor marks pushed him from Oriental languages into law?

Kazan. He failed the entrance exam at his first try, managed a year of Oriental languages, drifted through law and quit in 1847, saying later that he was little interested in what his professors read.

Why did Tolstoy leave for the Caucasus in 1851 and join the army?

He had run up heavy gambling debts. The habit followed him into the army: in 1854 he sold the main house he was born in to cover another loss, and the buyer took it apart and rebuilt it elsewhere.

In which Crimean War city, besieged for eleven months, did Tolstoy serve as a young artillery officer?

Sevastopol. He turned what he saw into three sketches that helped make his name, and the slaughter he witnessed there set the young officer on the road to becoming a lifelong opponent of war.

What was Tolstoy's first published work, in 1852?

Childhood. He posted it from the Caucasus to the journal Sovremennik without giving his name; its editor, the poet Nekrasov, printed it signed only with the author's initials, and it was widely praised.

What did Tolstoy witness in Paris in 1857 that marked him for the rest of his life?

A public execution. He got up early to watch the guillotine, could not sleep properly for a long time afterwards, and wrote to a friend: 'I shall never serve any government anywhere.'

Which exiled French radical did Tolstoy visit in Brussels in 1861, the author of a book titled La Guerre et la Paix?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Tolstoy may have borrowed that title for his own masterpiece, and he wrote that Proudhon was the only man who understood the significance of education in their time.

Tolstoy said which French novelist's account of Waterloo first taught him to understand war?

Stendhal. In The Charterhouse of Parma his hero crosses the battlefield understanding nothing, and Tolstoy, who then checked it with his own eyes in the Crimea, wrote Borodino the same way.

What helped close Tolstoy's free peasant school in 1862?

A police raid. Acting on an informer's tip while Tolstoy was away, officers searched the estate and found nothing; his school, which set no homework and scolded no latecomers, shut within months.

Whom did Tolstoy marry in September 1862?

Sophia Behrs. Her family was sure he had come courting her elder sister Liza; instead he handed 18-year-old Sophia a written proposal and married her a week later.

Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata borrows its title from a violin sonata by which composer?

Beethoven. In the story a husband hears his wife play the sonata with a violinist and is driven to kill her, and its plea for chastity even inside marriage stunned readers with its boldness.

What did Tolstoy give his fiancée on the eve of their wedding?

His diaries detailing his sexual past. They told her a serf on the estate had borne him a son, and he later gave the scene to a bridegroom in Anna Karenina, whose fiancée is just as hurt by what she reads.

What was Tolstoy's wife's part in the making of War and Peace?

She copied out the manuscript again and again. Tolstoy never stopped revising, so his wife wrote out each new version by hand to give the publisher a clean draft, while also running the estate and the family finances.

Which real general, who abandoned Moscow, is a hero of War and Peace?

Kutuzov. Tolstoy turns the old, ailing field marshal into the novel's true leader, a gentle man who wins by not trying to direct events and sees war more clearly than Napoleon does.

What did Tolstoy originally intend War and Peace to investigate?

The causes of the Decembrist revolt. Tolstoy meant to write about the officers who rose against the tsar in 1825, went back to the war with Napoleon to explain them, and wrote about that instead.

Tolstoy told Maxim Gorky that War and Peace was, 'without false modesty', like which ancient epic?

The Iliad. Yet when the book first appeared he refused to label it at all, insisting it was 'not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle'.

Which Anna Karenina character is a philosophical landowner who works the fields, like Tolstoy?

Levin. His name is built on Tolstoy's own, Lev, and he courts Kitty just as Tolstoy courted his wife, writing out only the initial of each word for her to decode.

What did Tolstoy start hiding away while finishing Anna Karenina?

Guns and ropes, fearing he would kill himself. By his own account he had everything, fame, a large estate and a loving family, and was not yet fifty when he hid a cord so he would not hang himself in his room.

Which author, asked to name the three greatest novels, is said to have answered 'Anna Karenina' three times over?

William Faulkner. The praise had begun early: Dostoevsky gave the novel a whole essay in 1877, while its last part was still new, and called it perfect as a work of art.

Which German philosopher gave Tolstoy 'constant raptures' in the summer of 1869?

Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy told a friend he was now convinced the pessimist was 'the greatest genius among men', and ten years later he quoted the closing lines of his great book in Confession.

Which Gospel passage did Tolstoy call the essence of Christ's teaching, reading it as a ban on all force?

The Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy found its key in three words, 'Resist not evil', took them to forbid any use of physical force, and accused the churches of perverting what Jesus had plainly said.

Which Tolstoy work on nonviolent resistance directly influenced Mahatma Gandhi?

The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Banned in Russia, it had to be printed first in Germany, and Gandhi wrote that it overwhelmed him and left an abiding impression.

Which Irish novelist called a Tolstoy tale about a land-hungry peasant the greatest story in the world's literature?

James Joyce. In the tale a peasant is promised all the ground he can walk around in a day; he drops dead at the finish, and the land he turns out to need is a grave six feet long.

Which 1908 Tolstoy text told a colonised people to free itself through love and non-violence?

A Letter to a Hindu. Gandhi, then an activist in South Africa, wrote to ask whether Tolstoy was really its author, then translated it into Gujarati and printed it in his own newspaper.

Tolstoy told which playwright friend that his plays were even worse than Shakespeare's?

Anton Chekhov. Tolstoy loved his young friend's short stories but could not bear his plays, and Shakespeare fared little better: Tolstoy tore King Lear apart in a long essay.

Which Tolstoy novel led to his excommunication in 1901?

Resurrection. Its hero, a nobleman on a jury, recognises the accused as a woman he once seduced and follows her to Siberia; the chapters that mock the Church were more than the Holy Synod would bear.

Which economic philosophy did Tolstoy champion in his last years, writing it into his final long novel?

Georgism. Tolstoy revered the American Henry George, who wanted the rent of land shared by all, and said that people did not argue with George's teaching, they simply did not know it.

Which persecuted pacifist sect did Tolstoy help emigrate to Canada in the 1890s?

The Doukhobors. They had burned their weapons in protest in 1895, and Tolstoy gave the royalties of his last long novel to help pay for their passage to Canada.

Which disciple led Tolstoy's followers and vied with his wife for control of his writings?

Vladimir Chertkov. Tolstoy named him editor of his works, yet refused to join the Tolstoyan movement Chertkov built in his name, because he was against belonging to any organisation at all.

A slaughterhouse visit in which city confirmed Tolstoy's belief that meat should be removed from the diet?

Tula. It was the town nearest his estate, and he admits he kept putting the visit off out of shame, until a novice butcher he met on the road agreed with him that eating meat was only a luxury.

In his sixties, Tolstoy took lessons from a Moscow club to master which new skill?

Riding a bicycle. In 1895 the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers gave him a free machine and instruction; his children admired his skill, while his disciples were doubtful about the whole thing.

Which pastime, taught him by his father, did Tolstoy give up in the 1880s on ethical grounds?

Hunting. As a boy he rode out with his father's hunt and he shot game for decades, but he came to call killing for sport a moral evil, though he never gave up riding horses.

Tolstoy challenged which fellow novelist to a duel in 1861, after a quarrel at a friend's house?

Ivan Turgenev. The row was over how Turgenev's daughter was being brought up; no shots were fired, but the two did not speak for 17 years, and Turgenev's deathbed letter begged Tolstoy to go back to writing.

According to the famous first sentence of Anna Karenina, which of these are all alike?

Happy families. Each unhappy family, the line goes on, is unhappy in its own way, and Jared Diamond borrowed the idea as the 'Anna Karenina principle': success needs everything right, failure just one thing wrong.

Tolstoy said he was glad to miss out on which prize, since it spared him from dealing with the money?

The Nobel Prize. Nominated for the literature award every year from 1902 to 1906, he never won it, and wrote that being passed over had saved him from the painful necessity of dealing with money.

Where did Tolstoy die in November 1910?

Astapovo railway station. At 82 he had slipped away from home before dawn, fell ill on the train and died in the stationmaster's house; the station was later renamed after him.

Which Hollywood star played Natasha Rostova in King Vidor's 1956 film of War and Peace?

Audrey Hepburn. The film was such a hit in Soviet cinemas that Moscow ordered a homegrown answer, which became the most expensive film the USSR ever made.

Which of his children did Tolstoy name in his will as the heir to his writings?

Alexandra. He wanted his works to belong to the Russian people, but the law required a single heir, so his youngest daughter was to hand them over, and the will left his wife no rights in them at all.

Which War and Peace hero, an awkward illegitimate son who inherits a vast fortune, finally marries Natasha?

Pierre Bezukhov. Tolstoy made him a voice for his own struggles: he drifts through a bad marriage, joins the Freemasons and is taken prisoner by the French before he finds any peace.

Which Soviet leader argued in essays that Tolstoy's nonresistance hindered the 1905 revolution?

Vladimir Lenin. His 1908 article called Tolstoy the 'mirror of the Russian revolution': on one hand a great artist and fierce critic of exploitation, on the other a 'landlord obsessed with Christ'.

Which Akira Kurosawa film was inspired by Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich?

Ikiru. Kurosawa moved the story to modern Tokyo, where a bureaucrat who learns he is dying spends his last months forcing a children's playground through the city offices.

Which actor earned an Oscar nomination for playing Tolstoy in a 2009 film about the writer's final year?

Christopher Plummer. It was his first Oscar nomination, and Helen Mirren was nominated beside him as the wife who fights her husband's disciples for the rights to his books.

In his last years Tolstoy sat for Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a Russian pioneer of which kind of photography?

Colour. Prokudin-Gorsky shot him through red, green and blue filters, and the portrait's fame helped win the photographer the tsar's backing to record the whole Russian Empire in colour.

Which adventure hero befriends an elderly Tolstoy as a boy in a 1990s television series?

Indiana Jones. George Lucas built the series around the young Indy meeting real figures, from Lawrence of Arabia to Picasso, and its Tolstoy, played by Michael Gough, becomes the boy's friend and mentor.

Ivan Ilyich, the dying hero of a famous Tolstoy novella, has risen to become what?

A judge. He knocks his side while showing a workman how to hang curtains in his smart new home, a pain sets in there and never leaves, and as he lies dying he sees that his proper, successful life was wasted on trivialities.

Which two Chinese sages did Tolstoy list beside Buddha and Socrates as teachers of the same law of love?

Confucius and Laozi. Tolstoy held that every great teacher had preached the same two rules, love of God and love of one's neighbour, so he read the Chinese masters as allies of the Gospels.

Which war, then in its first months, drove Tolstoy to write his 1904 protest pamphlet Bethink Yourselves?

The Russo-Japanese War. Its opening calls the fighting 'sufferings, necessary to nobody', and it asks how Buddhists, whose law forbids killing, and Christians, who profess love, can hunt each other like wild beasts.

How did Tolstoy come to regard War and Peace and Anna Karenina after his religious conversion?

As counterfeit art. In What Is Art? he threw out Shakespeare's plays along with his own great novels, and held up the Bible story of Joseph and Dostoevsky's House of the Dead as the real thing.