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to portray the lives of contemporary Russians,
focusing on three marriages of varying stability
and happiness. He used the story of the leading
character's passionate but adulterous affair to
criticize the moral hypocrisy of his society.
By the late 1870s, Tolstoy had entered a
period of personal turmoil, as he struggled with
bouts of depression and embarked on a spiritual
journey that led to an embrace of a radical Chris-
tianity based solely on universal love and resis-
tance to the evil of violence, which he first
chronicled in A Confession (1882). Increasingly
didactic, Tolstoy wrote widely on topics ranging
from capital punishment to vegetarianism, and
while his writings brought him into conflict with
official society and the Orthodox Church, he
found a receptive audience in Russia and
beyond. Renewed by his religious commitment,
Tolstoy entered a third creative cycle that saw the
publication of shorter pieces such as The Death of
Ivan Ilich (1888); The Kreutzer Sonata (1889),
which stirred Russian society with its frank dis-
cussion of sexual attraction and chastity; and Res-
urrection (1899). In his last published prose work,
Hadji Murad (1904), Tolstoy returned to the his-
torical fiction and the Caucasus of his younger
days. As he tried to live according to the dictates
of his increasingly strict beliefs, his relations with
his wife deteriorated considerably. In November
1910, Tolstoy abandoned his home but soon con-
tracted pneumonia and died at the village rail-
way station of Astapovo. In his final years an
ardent following developed around Tolstoy,
much to his discomfort. Visitors traveled to Yas-
naya Polyana to see him, while Tolstoyan com-
munities devoted to a simple, nonviolent life
sprang up around the world.
Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (Library of Congress)
estate. In 1862 he married Sofia Bers, 16 years
his junior, settling down to a period of rural
domesticity that witnessed some of his greatest
written work.
War and Peace, the massive novel about the
War of 1812 and to many his greatest literary
achievement, was published between 1865 and
1869. Originally intended to be a novel about the
ill-fated Decembrist conspirators, the novel
developed into a sprawling tableau depicting the
lives of over 500 characters, both fictional and
historical, with the eye for detail and psycholog-
ical analysis that were becoming Tolstoy's trade-
mark. The novel also included an extended
exposition of a philosophy of history that ques-
tioned the impact of great men such as Napoleon
on the making of history. His second masterpiece,
Anna Karenina (1875-77), followed almost a
decade later. Tolstoy moved away from the past
Ton, Konstantin Andreevich
(1794-1881)
architect
Born in St. Petersburg, Ton emerged in the
mid-nineteenth century as the leading proponent
of a “Russian style” in distinction to the classicism
that had long prevailed in Russian architecture.
His two brothers, Aleksandr Andreevich and
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