Photograph on cabinet card of Count Tolstoy between 1880 and 1886. Leo Tolstoy (Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy September 9, 1828 - November 20, 1910) was a Russian novelist and short story writer. He was a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the world's greatest novelists. He is best known for two long novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). He first achieved literary acclaim for his Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War, followed by the publication of a semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1855-1858). His fiction output also includes two additional novels, dozens of short stories, and several famous novellas, including The Death of Ivan Ilych, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. He is also remembered for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a spiritual awakening in the 1870s, when he became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. He was Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance had a profound impact on Gandhi who called Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". He died in 1910 at the age of 82.