Born into the Russian aristocracy, Count Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) achieved fame as a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and philosopher. His sprawling portraits of 19th-century Russian life, as recounted in Anna Karenina and War and Peace, constitute his best-known works. The spiritual awakening that Tolstoy experienced in the 1870s led to a fervent embrace of Christ's teachings, and his writings on the doctrine of nonviolent resistance influenced countless readers, including Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
