Leo Tolstoy was one of history's greatest novelists, whose War and Peace and Anna Karenina stand among literature's supreme achievements. But in his later decades, Tolstoy renounced art for radical Christianity, becoming a pacifist, anarchist, and moral reformer whose ideas influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the anarchist movement.
Born to Russian aristocracy, Tolstoy served in the army, managed estates, and produced masterworks of psychological realism. Then, in his 50s, a spiritual crisis led him to reject wealth, status, and the Orthodox Church for a stripped-down Christianity focused on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount—nonviolence, simple living, and rejection of all coercive authority, including government.
Tolstoy's Christian anarchism held that the state is organized violence and true Christians cannot participate in it—no military service, no courts, no coercion. He freed his serfs, lived simply, and inspired communities worldwide. The Orthodox Church excommunicated him. His philosophy directly influenced Gandhi's nonviolent resistance, which in turn shaped the American civil rights movement.