Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian author whose classic novels include War and Peace (1863-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-77).

Tolstoy's fiction grew originally out of his diaries, in which he tried to understand his own feelings and actions so as to control them. Tolstoy's major work, War and Peace, appeared between the years 1865 and 1869. The epic tale depicted the story of five families against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Tolstoy's other masterpiece, Anna Karenina, told a tragic story of a married woman, who follows her lover, but finally commits suicide. Tolstoy juxtaposed in the work crises of family life with the quest for the meaning of life.

“I am convinced that nothing has so marked an influence on the direction of a man's mind as his appearance, and not his appearance itself so much as his conviction that it is attractive or unattractive."