Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born on his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow, and lost both parents in childhood. He served as an artillery officer in the Caucasus and in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, which he described in the Sevastopol Sketches. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs, who copied his manuscripts many times over, and in the following decade and a half he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. After a spiritual crisis described in A Confession (1882) he devoted himself to a personal reading of the Gospels, nonviolence and simple living, wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Resurrection, and was excommunicated by the Holy Synod in 1901. He died at the railway station of Astapovo in November 1910.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
