50 Fun Facts About Leo Tolstoy

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

It lies 200 kilometres south of Moscow and is now a museum run by his great-great-grandson Vladimir.

What aristocratic title did Tolstoy hold?

His mother was a princess, née Volkonskaya; the family title was granted by Peter the Great.

How old was Tolstoy when his mother died?

His father died when he was nine, and he and his siblings were raised by relatives.

How did teachers at Kazan University describe the young Tolstoy?

He was studying law and oriental languages, and left before finishing.

Why did Tolstoy go to the Caucasus with his brother and join the army in 1851?

He served as an artillery officer and was promoted to lieutenant for courage in the Crimean War.

In which besieged city did Tolstoy serve as a young artillery officer for eleven months in 1854-55?

His Sevastopol Sketches came out of it, and the horror helped stir his later pacifism.

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

It was a fictionalised account of his own youth, followed by Boyhood and Youth; he later dismissed the trilogy as sentimental.

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

He wrote afterwards that the state was 'a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens'.

Which French anarchist's book, La Guerre et la Paix, gave Tolstoy the title of his masterpiece?

Tolstoy visited him in Brussels exile in March 1861 and called him the only man who understood the significance of education.

Which French novelist did Tolstoy meet in 1860-61, whose battle scenes influenced War and Peace?

Hugo had just finished Les Misérables.

After the serfs were freed, how many peasant schools did Tolstoy found on his estate?

Harassment by the Tsarist secret police cut the experiment short, but it is seen as a forerunner of Summerhill.

Whom did Tolstoy marry in September 1862?

She was sixteen years his junior; family called her Sonya.

How many children did the Tolstoys have?

Eight lived to adulthood; the youngest, Alexandra, became heir to his writings.

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

They revealed that a serf on the estate had borne him a son; the early marriage was nonetheless happy.

What role did Sonya Tolstaya play in the making of War and Peace?

She was also his editor and financial manager; A. N. Wilson called their later marriage one of the unhappiest in literary history.

Roughly how many characters appear in War and Peace?

Tolstoy did not consider it a novel at all; he called Anna Karenina his first novel.

What did Tolstoy originally intend War and Peace to investigate?

The revolt is only reached in the last chapters, where Andrei Bolkonsky's son is set to become a Decembrist.

Tolstoy denied that War and Peace was a novel; what did he consider it instead?

He called Anna Karenina his first novel.

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

Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei and Nekhlyudov are other self-portraits.

What did Tolstoy start hiding away while finishing Anna Karenina?

The crisis led to the spiritual awakening described in Confession.

Which author, asked to name the three greatest novels, replied 'Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, and Anna Karenina'?

Woolf called Tolstoy 'the greatest of all novelists'; Flaubert exclaimed 'What an artist and what a psychologist!'

Whose The World as Will and Representation gave Tolstoy 'constant raptures' in summer 1869?

He quoted the book's final paragraph in Confession and took from it the ideal of voluntary poverty.

Which part of the Gospels most shaped Tolstoy's Christianity, with its command to turn the other cheek?

He read it as a 'commandment of non-resistance to evil by force'.

Which Tolstoy work on nonviolent resistance directly influenced Mahatma Gandhi?

Gandhi called Tolstoy 'the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced'.

What name did Gandhi give his second ashram in South Africa?

Their correspondence lasted barely a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death.

Which 1908 Tolstoy text, read by Gandhi, argued India could win independence through non-violence?

Gandhi wrote asking for proof Tolstoy was really the author, which started their correspondence.

Which ancient Tamil text, read in German translation, bolstered Tolstoy's concept of non-violence?

He passed the idea on to Gandhi in his famous letter to India.

In which year was Tolstoy excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church?

Resurrection was a major cause; his great-great-grandson's 2001 appeal to reverse it was refused.

Which economic philosophy, named for an American thinker, did Tolstoy champion in Resurrection?

He and Henry George both rejected private property in land and a centrally planned economy.

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

He also inspired the Mennonites and became a supporter of Esperanto.

Which Christian anarchist group did Vladimir Chertkov form to spread Tolstoy's teachings?

Tolstoy himself refused to join any organisation, including this one.

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

He described it in 'The First Step', his 1893 preface to a Russian translation of The Ethics of Diet.

Which food did Tolstoy give up in 1903 after a friend asked whether eating it amounted to taking life?

He had been strictly vegetarian since 1890 and lived on porridge, bread, cabbage soup, buckwheat and potatoes.

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

He had shot duck, quail, snipe and otters for decades; he never gave up riding.

How did Tolstoy describe writing poetry?

He criticised even Pushkin for 'false' epithets used simply to make a rhyme.

How many stories are collected in Tolstoy's four-volume Russian Book for Reading for schoolchildren?

It was published with his New Azbuka primer and included verse fairy tales such as Volga-bogatyr.

For how many consecutive years was Tolstoy nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature without winning?

He was also nominated three times for the Peace Prize; the omission remains a famous Nobel controversy.

Where did Tolstoy die in November 1910?

He was 82 and had fled home by train; the stationmaster took him into his apartment.

How many people attended Tolstoy's funeral, watched over by police?

Three choirs sang and, at the family's request, there were no eulogies, though 100 students had asked to speak.

Which child did Tolstoy name as heir to his works so she would publish them for the Russian people?

Russian law would not let him leave them to the people directly; Chertkov was named editor.

How many volumes were in the collected Tolstoy edition agreed with Soviet publishers in 1928?

More than 400 million copies of his works were printed in the USSR, making him its best-selling author.

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

Lenin nonetheless saw his hatred of feudalism and capitalism as a prelude to proletarian socialism.

Which Akira Kurosawa film is an adaptation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich?

Kazuo Ishiguro's screenplay for Living (2022) reworked the same novella.

Who played Tolstoy in the 2009 film The Last Station, earning an Oscar nomination?

Helen Mirren was also nominated as Sofya; the film covers his final year.

Why was Burton Holmes's film of Tolstoy, shot on his estate a decade before his death, destroyed?

Senator Albert Beveridge had been in the room; the footage is now a famous lost film.

In which George Lucas TV series does a fictional Tolstoy appear as a mentor and friend?

Michael Gough played him in the TV movie Travels with Father.

Which Norwegian playwright is closely related to the Swedish Paus branch of Tolstoy's descendants?

Tolstoy's son Lev settled in Sweden; jazz singer Viktoria Tolstoy is among the Swedish descendants.

Which Chinese thinkers did the sinophile Tolstoy read after the Boxer Rebellion stirred his interest?

He advised the intellectual Gu Hongming that China should stay agrarian and not reform as Japan had.

Which two monarchs did Tolstoy blame most for the Eight-Nation Alliance's atrocities in China?

He praised the Boxer Rebellion and condemned the troops' 'Christian brutality'.

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

He sought instead a Christian art of universal brotherly love.