Leo Tolstoy

Most people meet him first through a line about self-improvement or the futility of trying to change the world instead of yourself. The name attached to those lines belongs to a Russian novelist and moral thinker who wrote *War and Peace* and *Anna Karenina*, and who spent much of his working life turning a critical eye on the customs and institutions around him.

He was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, in the Russian Empire, and by the account of his biographers he built up habits of reading, watching and thinking things over early. Teachers, books and travel broadened what he had to work with and sharpened his practical judgement. His early writing already showed a willingness to question inherited practice and try something else instead. Argument and collaboration functioned as a kind of workshop: talk was pushed until it became method, small trials hardened into patterns, and patterns into a craft that could be taught. Setbacks he treated as information about what he was actually aiming at.

The mid-career projects were larger and demanded more of him — more stamina, more clarity, and the ability to work under pressure from allies, rivals and institutions all wanting results. Money and materials were sometimes short; he found ways round it. The major works condensed what he had learned into a form other people could pick up and apply to their own circumstances, and public argument tested the claims until the durable parts were obvious.

He died in 1910. The later years went into teaching, notes and setting standards for the work that would follow, and the archives preserve the ordinary texture behind the public milestones. Readers in many languages still take something usable from the books, scholars still disagree about what he meant, and the phrase most often used to sum him up remains simply *War and Peace*, *Anna Karenina*, and the social criticism that ran alongside them.