Russian novelist who wrote War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich — widely considered among the greatest novelists who ever lived — who in his later life underwent a religious conversion and became an anarcho-pacifist Christian moralist, influencing Gandhi and Tolstoyan movements worldwide.
Created the novel of total historical reality — War and Peace's alternation between the intimate particularity of individual consciousness and the vast impersonal forces of Napoleonic history (Tolstoy's 'swarm-life') and his anti-heroic philosophy of history (great men are foam on the wave, not its cause) constitute the most ambitious fictional engagement with history ever attempted.
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