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Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sevastopol wrote The Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6), which established his literary reputation. Among his best known novels are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). In 1910 at the age of eighty-two he fled from home 'leaving this worldly life in order to live out my last days in peace and solitude'; dying some days later at the station master's house at Astapovo. Donna Tussing Orwin, who teaches Russian Literature at the University of Toronto, was Editor of Tolstoy Studies Journal from 1997-2004, and is now President of the North American Tolstoy Society. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (2002) and is currently editing a collection of newly commissioned essays about Tolstoy to be published in Russia in 2010 by the Russian Academy of Sciences.
