Leo Tolstoy

Born into aristocracy at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy gambled away a fortune as a young officer, then fought at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, an experience that fed his lifelong suspicion of glory and battle-narrative alike. He returned home to run his estate, founded a school for peasant children, and spent the next decades writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina at a pitch of realism no one has matched since.

In his fifties he underwent a moral and religious conversion, renouncing his own novels as vanity and preaching a pacifist, ascetic Christianity that got him excommunicated by the Orthodox Church and made him a model for Gandhi. At eighty-two he fled his estate and his wife in the night; he died days later of pneumonia at a remote railway station, the most famous man in Russia collapsing among strangers.