Leo Tolstoy began publishing while serving in the Russian army in the Caucasus and the Crimean War. Childhood appeared in 1852, followed by works combining personal experience with imaginative construction. The Sevastopol Sketches examined warfare through fear, confusion, and suffering rather than exclusively heroic spectacle. Leaving military service, he traveled in Europe and pursued educational experiments, including a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana.

Marriage to Sofia Behrs in 1862 accompanied the period of his largest literary projects. War and Peace, completed in the 1860s, joined family stories to the Napoleonic wars and reflections on historical causation, challenging the idea that great individuals alone direct events. Anna Karenina, completed in 1877, examined marriage, desire, social judgment, and moral searching. Sofia's copying, editing, and management contributed to the conditions in which the books were produced, although their domestic relationship later became deeply strained.

A spiritual crisis led Tolstoy toward a religious and ethical program described in A Confession. He emphasized the teachings of Jesus, nonresistance to violence, simple living, and criticism of state power and institutional religion. His positions brought conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church, which formally excluded him in 1901. The Kingdom of God Is Within You and related writings influenced readers including Gandhi. His attack on coercion and property also created tension with his position as a wealthy landowner and with his family's practical needs and wishes.

Later fiction, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Resurrection, explored mortality, injustice, and moral responsibility. What Is Art? questioned conventional aesthetic judgments and argued for the ethical function of artistic communication. Tolstoy supported humanitarian causes and corresponded with people seeking guidance, becoming an international moral figure as well as a novelist. Disputes over publication rights, household life, and followers' influence intensified his final years. In 1910 he left home, became ill during the journey, and died at Astapovo. His literary achievements and ethical teachings remained closely related without always fitting comfortably together. Later readers drew different lessons from his realism, religious dissent, and nonviolent thought, while his difficulty reconciling convictions with personal circumstances remains part of the record.