115 years ago today, on November 20, 1910 (October 9, 1910 lunar calendar), the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy died. Tolstoy in the countryside November 20, 1910 The Russian writer Tolstoy died. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (English: September 9, LeoNikolayevichTolstoy1828 (August 28, Julian calendar) - November 20, 1910 (Julian calendar November 7)) Russian novelist, philosopher, political thinker. He was also a non-violent Christian anarchist and educational reformer. He was one of the most influential of Tolstoy's noble family. Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian writer, reformer and moral thinker. Tolstoy's immortal reputation was largely due to his two novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was filled with deep contradictions. He was an individualistic aristocrat who, in his later years, tried unsuccessfully to live the life of a poor peasant; he was initially obsessed with style and color, but eventually became a complete Puritan; he had extraordinary vitality, but almost always feared death. This curious duality led him to abandon his simple career as a novelist in the middle of his life and become a devout Christian; in his endless stream of essays, pamphlets, and mostly didactic short stories and plays, he preached his belief in a life of love and loyalty and his disdain for property and artificial institutions such as government and the church. Early years and marriage Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 (August 28 old calendar) in Yasnaya Polyana (part of the province of Tula), his family's manor, about 160 kilometers south of Moscow. Tolstoy's parents died as a child and was raised by relatives. Taught as a tutor in his early years, he entered Kazan University at the age of 16, but disappointed with the school's rigid teaching, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana in 1847 to run his estate and arrange his own studies. He failed in both respects, so he gave up his pastoral life and threw himself into the tumultuous social circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In his diary, he recorded his moral transgressions. The youthful diary has revealed a talent for realist exploration of the hidden motives of his actions, and an unusual ability for analysis. Tired of this mediocre life, Tolstoy defected to his brother Nicholas, a soldier in the Caucasus, in 1851. The next year, he also joined the army and showed bravery in several battles with mountain tribes. Most of his spare time was devoted to writing, which became his first published work, Childhood, in the magazine Modern Man. In 1854, Tolstoy was transferred to the Danube front and took part in the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War. He described these experiences in "The Story of Sevastopol", in which he contrasted the simple heroism of ordinary soldiers with the possessive bravery of upper-class officers. After the war ended in 1856, he left the army for St. Petersburg, where he became the object of admiration for competing literary groups that competed for his support for their social and aesthetic views. A clear-minded individualist, he rejected these small circles of literati and returned to Yasnaya Polyana. In 1857, he traveled to France, Switzerland, and Germany. In 1862, Tolstoy married Beers, who was born into an educated, middle-class family. He took a break from his educational activities and for the next 15 years devoted all his enthusiasm to his married life. Most of the married life was lively and happy, and they had a total of 13 children. He managed the estate well and resumed writing, creating two of his greatest masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Two masterpieces Tolstoy spent almost seven years writing his epic masterpiece, War and Peace, which is often considered one of the two or three greatest novels in world literature. Regardless of the scope involved or the style of writing, this masterpiece far exceeds his previous works. In this novel, all the materials of life are interwoven into a magnificent and colorful picture, and the rich materials and numerous characters are treated and depicted in an extremely objective manner. Probably no other novel has been able to successfully reflect the overall style of complete natural life through an accurate grasp of the details of reality and an astonishingly fine and varied psychological analysis. Although "Anna Karenina" is at least similar to "War and Peace" in narrative method and style, it is more unified in art. In the time between the writing of these two books, Tolstoy's philosophy of life gradually changed. "War and Peace" is a life-loving, optimistic novel in which the main characters are morally sound and capable of taking charge of their own internal conflicts; "Anna Karenina", which describes Russian society in the 1860s, is pessimistic, and its characters' internal conflicts are often unresolved and sometimes lead to human disasters. The old Tolstoy agonized over the contradiction between the pampered life of his family and the life he wanted to lead, a simple life of a monastic hermit free from worldly materialism and dedicated to the service of others. He realized that his condition was a mockery of his professed beliefs, and finally, the deteriorating family situation forced Tolstoy to secretly run away from home one night; accompanied by his doctor and young daughter Alexandra, he hoped to find a hiding place where he could live in peace and be closer to God. A few days later, on November 20 (November 7 in the old calendar), he died of pneumonia at the remote Astapovo railway station in Liangzan Province. Evaluation Critics have never questioned Tolstoy's outstanding achievements as a writer; he is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists in the world. Although Tolstoy never followed the Russian writers who preceded him, he may have been influenced by foreign writers such as Rousseau, Stern, Stendahl, and later Thackeray, but there has never been a consensus on his reputation as a thinker, but the duality of Tolstoy's moral and intellectual development has been better understood by modern scholars who study his ideas. In his tireless search for truth, he was striving for absolute truth in a world of incomplete knowledge and imperfect human beings. As a result, his unwillingness to compromise, his insistence on a thorough rational explanation, often led him to push theories to the point of absurdity; many believe that his views on history, nonviolence, education, and art have come very close to this absurdity. But a systematic study of his ideas reveals its relationship to the ideas of nineteenth-century liberalism. He believed that the whole of history for two thousand years consisted chiefly of the moral progress of the individual and the moral corruption of government. Tolstoy placed his faith in the moral progress of men as the decisive answer to the universal oppression of the majority by the minority. He believed that, contrary to the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism and the violent class struggle, the progressive movement that had brought mankind to a classless and stateless state depended on the exercise by each individual of the supreme law of love, and therefore the rejection of all forms of violence: through all this he made himself morally perfect. Although Tolstoy took his rationalism to extremes, he is still recognized today as one of the most influential moralists of the 19th century. Tolstoy died on November 10, 1910 Stills from the Soviet film War and Peace