He volunteered to fight in a war against the Chechen mountain tribes, and went on to fight in the Crimean War. He wrote stories about the battles he witnessed and he described military battles as realistically as possible. He was one of the first writers to describe battles as chaotic and insane and meaningless.
In the 1850s, Russia was still operating under a medieval economic system with most of the peasants enslaved as serfs. Tolstoy opened a school for peasants on his family's estate, and helped open more than 20 schools in surrounding villages. He believed in complete freedom in the classroom and let his students study whatever interested them. He also edited an educational journal, and wrote that the upper classes had as much to learn from peasants as peasants had to learn from the upper classes.
Tolstoy got married in 1862, and it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He wrote, "Domestic happiness has swallowed me completely." His wife had 13 children, and she helped him copy out and edit all his manuscripts. She copied by hand the huge manuscript for War and Peace (1868) four times.
During the first years of his marriage, free love was becoming fashionable among the Russian upper classes, and everyone started to think of marriage as old fashioned and silly. Tolstoy was disgusted. In 1872, he heard about a woman who had thrown herself in front of a train after the end of an affair, and it gave him an idea for a novel about a woman whose life is destroyed by adultery. That novel was Anna Karenina (1875). He wrote it as a defense of marriage as the most important foundation of society. When it was published, most critics said it was inferior to War and Peace, but it is now considered one of the greatest novels ever written.
After publishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy fell into a deep depression. He was healthy, and he had plenty of money, but he felt that life had no purpose. He noticed that the peasants on his estate wore ragged clothes, lived in leaky huts, and had no way of improving their lives, but they were happy. He came to believe that they knew the meaning of life, so he renounced all his property and became a peasant. He learned to make his own food and clothes, and lived in a hut. He started to write theology and philosophy and founded his own form of Christianity. He became a kind of prophet, and people from all over the world visited him and wrote to him, including Woodrow Wilson and Mahatma Gandhi. Leo Tolstoy said, "In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."
