Introduction

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born during the summer of 1828 in the comfort of a noble family’s estate, near Tula, about 120 miles south of Moscow. In the late 1840s and 1850s, between his upbringing and his wedding, Tolstoy spent time out and about mingling with the Russian aristocracy and in literary circles. In short, Tolstoy had the time and inclination to self-educate himself both through reading and through observing wider society. Back in Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy spent time reading, writing, trying to offer a better deal for his serfs, working on the land, hunting, and having an affair with a young local peasant. The Christianity which Tolstoy came to eventually subscribe to was therefore zealously rationalistic. He effectively reduced religion mostly to morality, and from its cosmology could only keep what he decided made rational sense.