Tolstoy's life was as fascinating as his novels.

He was born in 1828 into an aristocratic family. The family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, some 80 miles outside Moscow, became effectively a site for pilgrimage even during Tolstoy's lifetime. Tolstoy's parents both died during his childhood, and he and his brothers and sisters moved to Kazan. After leaving university without graduating - and where, like most young aristocrats, he had led a wild and riotous life - he returned to his estate, and attempted to implement social reform to improve the lot of the peasants.

In 1851, Tolstoy served in the army in the Caucasus. During his military career, he fought in the Crimean War. At this time also, he wrote his first published works - the autobiographical trilogy Boyhood, Childhood and Youth, and The Sevastopol Sketches, based on his military experiences.

Back on his estate, he continued his attempted social reforms, but without much success. In 1862, he married Sofya Behrs. Like the fictional Levin in Anna Karenina, he showed Sofya his diaries containing details of his past dissipation; and like the fictional Kitty, Sofya, despite Tolstoy’s intention to be totally honest, was shocked.

Soon after his marriage, he embarked on War and Peace. After five years of labour, he produced the novel that many still regard as the greatest ever written. In 1873, he started on Anna Karenina - one of the few novels that challenges War and Peace for that status. But Tolstoy was already undergoing a spiritual crisis, and this led him into a period of intense theological studies.

Tolstoy questioned the purpose of life in the face of death. As a result of his questionings, he arrived at a deeply personal and idiosyncratic interpretations of the gospels. The social iniquities that had disturbed him in the past now took on a grater importance: what right does anyone have to enjoy the comforts of life in the face of such suffering? Tolstoy, much to the distress of his wife and family, rejected almost everything that had been part of his life up till then - including, quite unbelievably, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Any art that does not have a moral purpose, he declared, was worthless. And that included not merely his own works, but Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven, Michelangelo.... All institutions - the government, the courts, the church, the military, the prisons - he saw as instruments to oppress humanity. Private property he saw as sinful. Sexual desire he saw as merely something to ensnare the human soul, and prevent it from discovering the love of Christ.

The law of Christ he saw as the law of love and of non-violence. He preached universal love and brotherhood. The Kingdom of Heaven, he declared, was within ourselves, and strove to establish it as a reality here on earth. To this end, he abjured his aristocratic heritage, and tried to live as a shoemaker. He continued writing, but instead of the complexities of his earlier work, he took to writing fables - stories with morals. But here was the twist: try as he could, he could not suppress the artist in himself: his fables are the greatest ever written. James Joyce described them as "the world's greatest literature".

He wrote many religious pamphlets as well - including A Confession, What I Believe, and The Kingdom of God is Within You - mercilessly castigating the way he had formerly lived.

Yasnaya Polyana became a place for pilgrimage, as many young people across Russia tried to live by Tolstoy's precepts. Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy corresponded with a young man who later was to become another great apostle of non-violence: Mahatma Gandhi. The literary masterpieces continued to flow, despite everything. The Death of Ivan Illych, The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, Father Sergius etc. are all works of great genius, no matter how loopy many of Tolstoy's convictions may seem by this stage. He wrote a short novel called Hadji Murat: it was a work without a moral purpose, and Tolstoy felt guilty writing it. Needless to say, it is a stunning masterpiece. His last full-length novel, Resurrection, contained bitter attacks on all the institutions of society which, by now, Tolstoy had come to see as cruel and Godless. Not surprisingly, the Orthodox Church excommunicated him.

Tolstoy never turned his back on reality. In 1890, he personally supervised famine relief. In 1905, he wrote pamphlets against Russia's war against Japan: this led to a police raid, when may of his writings were confiscated. And in 1909, a year before his death, he wrote the pamphlet I Cannot Be Silent - a protest against the hanging of the 1905 revolutionaries.

But Tolstoy continued to be tormented with doubts and with guilt. Finally, in 1910, aged 82 - by then a world renowned figure, and not merely for the greatness of his writings - he walked away from Yasnaya Polyana. This was too much even for a man of Tolstoy's powerful physique to take. He fell ill, and died in a station-master's cottage.

Himadri Chatterjee currently works as an operational research analyst for an airline, and lives near London, UK, with his wife and two children. What spare time he has apart from his day job and family commitments, he likes to spend reading, and listening to classical music. He also loves the theatre, good conversation, and good whisky (he is a long-standing member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society).
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