TOLSTOY

It's the birthday of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (books by this author), born on his family's estate in the province of Tula, near Moscow (1828). As a young man, he loved to drink and gamble, but he always felt guilty about it. He started keeping a diary, and wrote his first diary entry about his fear that he had contracted a venereal disease. He wrote pages and pages wondering why he couldn't help breaking all the rules that society had made for him, and he became fascinated by the idea that people are always trying to stop themselves from doing what they really want to do.
He volunteered to fight in a war against the Chechen mountain tribes, and went on to fight in the Crimean War. He wrote stories about the battles he witnessed, and he was one of the first writers to describe battles as chaotic and insane and meaningless. At the end of one story, he wrote that none of the characters in the story were heroes; the only hero in the story was the truth.
In the 1850s, Russia was still operating under a medieval economic system with most of the peasants enslaved as serfs. Tolstoy opened a school for peasants on his family's estate, and helped open more than 20 schools in surrounding villages. He even liked to live like a peasant, with no upholstered furniture and no carpets on the floor, something that disturbed his wife when she first married him. But it was in those early happy years of his marriage that Tolstoy wrote his first masterpiece, War and Peace (1868), about Russian war against Napoleon's invasion. It was the longest and most ambitious novel he'd ever written, and he was only willing to attempt it because he now had his wife to work as his secretary. He would scribble corrections all over a rough draft, and she was the only person who could decipher what his corrections said. She ultimately copied by hand the 1,400-page manuscript four times.
In 1872, Tolstoy heard about a woman who had thrown herself in front of a train after the end of an affair, and he went to view the body at the train station. He never forgot what he saw that day, and it gave him an idea for a novel about a woman whose life is destroyed by adultery. That novel was Anna Karenina (1875), about a beautiful, highly respected married woman named Anna who arrives at her brother's house to help him reconcile with his wife, only to find herself falling into an adulterous affair with a dashing military man named Count Vronsky. It begins, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."