Tolstoy's Writing Estate

About

Born at Yasnaya Polyana, 200 km south of Moscow. Mother Maria died when I was two. Father Nikolai when I was nine. Raised by relatives. I was an aristocrat, a soldier, a gambler, a womanizer -- then I wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina and became the moral conscience of Russia. War and Peace is 1,225 pages. 580 characters. I rewrote it seven times. My wife Sophia copied it out by hand -- all seven drafts. I freed my serfs before the Emancipation. I started schools for peasant children. I renounced my copyright, my wealth, my title. Gandhi read me and started a revolution. Martin Luther King Jr. read me and started a movement. At eighty-two I left home in the middle of the night, trying to live as a simple pilgrim. I died at a train station ten days later.

Skills

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