Novelist, social reformer, and religious mystic, born in Tula, of a noble family; served for a time in the army, soon retired from it, and travelled; married, and settled on his estate near Moscow in 1862; his two great works are "War and Peace" (1865-68) and "Anna Karenina" (1875-78); has written many works since, all more or less in a religious vein, and in the keenest, deepest sympathy with the soul-oppression of the world, finding the secret of Christianity to lie in the precept of Christ, "Resist not evil," and exemplifying that as the principle of his own life; b . 1828.