A Brief Biography Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy "How is one to
understand the merits and inconsistencies of this remarkable and
mystifying character?" The question was Alexandra Tolstoy's, Leo
Tolstoy's aristocratic aunt, who loved him dearly and was his
foremost ally at the court of the Tsar. She was not alone in
asking the question. All who knew him well, except those
disciples who idolized him, confessed to some mixture of awe and
ambivalence towards the great Russian novelist. Tolstoy himself
was all too aware of the contradictions. No man was ever more
uncomfortable in his own skin. Tolstoy's personal diaries, kept
up throughout most of his 82 years, show plainly how ashamed he
was of the abyss that often separated his behaviors and his
beliefs. His life reads like a novel all its own. Born to a
father who had fought against Napoleon and to a wealthy spinster
who had never expected to marry, Leo Tolstoy was motherless at 2
and an orphan by age 7. At 19 he was the master of hundreds of
serfs (slaves, rea