Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher, born into the landed aristocracy and educated at home on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana. War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written in his thirties and forties; afterwards a religious crisis turned him against private property, the state and the church, and towards a Christian anarchism that drew followers from around the world. He renounced the copyright in his later work and died at a railway station after leaving home at eighty-two.