Leo Tolstoy

There has never been any doubt about Tolstoy's literary reputation as one of the world's greatest novelists. But in his own time and for some years after his death in 1910, he was also regarded as a major thinker and religious, social, and political reformer by multitudes of people in many countries. This reputation has almost vanished today, although most of the evils he struggled against in his didactic works are more dominant and of more anxious concern now than they were in the nineteenth century. There was a close connection between Tolstoy the literary artist and Tolstoy the thinker, and both appear to be a natural development of the kind of life he led. To demonstrate this fact in an effort to provide a total image of the man is the purpose of this book.