It’s the birthday of Leo Tolstoy (New Style; 1828-1910), one of the greatest novelists in the world and best known for War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-77), widely considered two of the greatest books of all time, which is impressive considering that Anna Karenina is jam-packed with long passages about things like the philosophy of farming—and nothing sells books like long passages about the philosophy of farming, unless it’s long passages about the skeletal system of the whale. (Waving to Melville here.)

Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate and village, about 100 miles south of Moscow; his family were aristocrats, which explains, you know, having their own village. But Mom died before Tolstoy was two, Dad died before he was 10, Grandma followed a year later, and then the auntie in charge a few years after that. So Tolstoy and his siblings were eventually raised by another aunt in western Russia. Tolstoy would later remember his childhood as idyllic, other than all that death.

Tolstoy studied at the University of Kazan, where he was such a poor student of Oriental languages that he had to switch to law. (Snicker.) He spent his time on literature, ethics, and extremely loose living. He left in 1847 with no degree but a possible venereal disease.

After returning to the family estate for a few years, Tolstoy entered the army in the Caucasus. He began publishing stories and sketches based on that experience, and his early work was highly praised, but the intellectuals in St. Petersburg disliked him for refusing to join their little clubs.

Tolstoy went to Paris in 1857, gambled away his money, and returned to the family estate to set up schools for the peasants, like you do. He married in 1862 and settled down to the business of writing War and Peace and having 13 children. (Ten survived. That’s pretty good.) War and Peace was first published serially, then as a whole in 1869. Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel because reasons. His “first true novel,” Anna Karenina, was also published serially before being released as a novel in 1878.

After this, Tolstoy underwent a religious conversion and then reworked Christianity until it wasn’t. He became a sort of pacifist/anarchist and spent the rest of his life gathering disciples and promoting ideas such as total abstinence. (*Irony alert.*) His marriage famously tanked, and only one daughter supported his teachings. With her help, he was running away from home when he died of heart failure at a railroad station.

Have a fantastic Monday, if you haven’t read Tolstoy yet for Pyotr’s sake get on that, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.