Leo Tolstoy Trivia
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50 free Leo Tolstoy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Leo Tolstoy trivia quiz covers the Russian count behind War and Peace and Anna Karenina, from the Yasnaya Polyana estate where he was born to the railway station where he died. The easy questions cover the two great novels, the nationality, the wife who copied out his manuscripts, the pacifism that inspired Gandhi and the Nobel Prize he never won. From there it moves through the life: the university that found him 'unable and unwilling to learn', the gambling debts, the artillery post at Sevastopol, the Paris execution that turned him against the state, the peasant schools, the thirteen children and the diaries he handed his bride. The harder end covers the Proudhon book that lent War and Peace its title, the 580 characters, the excommunication of 1901, the Doukhobors he helped emigrate, the slaughterhouse in Tula, the eggs he gave up in 1903, the Tolstoy Colony in South Africa, the lost 1901 film, and the Oscar-nominated pair who played him and Sonya in The Last Station. Every answer was checked against Tolstoy's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our classic literature and famous authors quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was the name of the family estate where Tolstoy was born and spent most of his life?
Yasnaya Polyana
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.
Q 02What aristocratic title did Tolstoy hold?
Count
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.
Q 03Which War and Peace heroine echoes Tolstoy's mother?
Marya Bolkonskaya
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.
Q 04Tolstoy left which university without a degree, after poor marks pushed him from Oriental languages into law?
Kazan
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.
Q 05Why did Tolstoy leave for the Caucasus in 1851 and join the army?
He had run up heavy gambling debts
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.
Q 06In which Crimean War city, besieged for eleven months, did Tolstoy serve as a young artillery officer?
Sevastopol
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.
Q 07What was Tolstoy's first published work, in 1852?
Childhood
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.
Q 08What did Tolstoy witness in Paris in 1857 that marked him for the rest of his life?
A public execution
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.'
Q 09Which exiled French radical did Tolstoy visit in Brussels in 1861, the author of a book titled La Guerre et la Paix?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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.
Q 10Tolstoy said which French novelist's account of Waterloo first taught him to understand war?
Stendhal
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.
Q 11What helped close Tolstoy's free peasant school in 1862?
A police raid
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.
Q 12Whom did Tolstoy marry in September 1862?
Sophia Behrs
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.
Q 13Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata borrows its title from a violin sonata by which composer?
Beethoven
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.
Q 21Which author, asked to name the three greatest novels, is said to have answered 'Anna Karenina' three times over?
William Faulkner
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.
Q 22Which German philosopher gave Tolstoy 'constant raptures' in the summer of 1869?
Arthur Schopenhauer
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.
Q 23Which Gospel passage did Tolstoy call the essence of Christ's teaching, reading it as a ban on all force?
Q 14What did Tolstoy give his fiancée on the eve of their wedding?
His diaries detailing his sexual past
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.
Q 15What was Tolstoy's wife's part in the making of War and Peace?
She copied out the manuscript again and again
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.
Q 16Which real general, who abandoned Moscow, is a hero of War and Peace?
Kutuzov
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.
Q 17What did Tolstoy originally intend War and Peace to investigate?
The causes of the Decembrist revolt
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.
Q 18Tolstoy told Maxim Gorky that War and Peace was, 'without false modesty', like which ancient epic?
The Iliad
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'.
Q 19Which Anna Karenina character is a philosophical landowner who works the fields, like Tolstoy?
Levin
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.
Q 20What did Tolstoy start hiding away while finishing Anna Karenina?
Guns and ropes, fearing he would kill himself
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.
The Sermon on the Mount
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.
Q 24Which Tolstoy work on nonviolent resistance directly influenced Mahatma Gandhi?
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
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.
Q 25Which Irish novelist called a Tolstoy tale about a land-hungry peasant the greatest story in the world's literature?
James Joyce
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.
Q 26Which 1908 Tolstoy text told a colonised people to free itself through love and non-violence?
A Letter to a Hindu
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.
Q 27Tolstoy told which playwright friend that his plays were even worse than Shakespeare's?
Anton Chekhov
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.
Q 28Which Tolstoy novel led to his excommunication in 1901?
Resurrection
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.
Q 29Which economic philosophy did Tolstoy champion in his last years, writing it into his final long novel?
Georgism
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.
Q 30Which persecuted pacifist sect did Tolstoy help emigrate to Canada in the 1890s?
The Doukhobors
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.