Leo Tolstoy's Life Analysis

When a person progresses throughout their life, s/he comes across many emotional and mental challenges. As one can see with the absurd amount of people that are going through changes where they have to make a decision that will affect their entire life. Looking at Leo Tolstoy, he says, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”(Tolstoy). Tolstoy’s life was filled with many decisions that would change his life forever. When Tolstoy had been still very young, he was born into a very wealthy aristocratic family, but at age nine was moved to Kazan with his aunt after both of his parents had died. At age 16 Tolstoy enrolled at Kazan State University, where he pursued autodidactism, but after that his life started

When Tolstoy had been just a boy he had to deal with many deaths of his family members that had caused him to move all around his family’s estate in Moscow. This resulted in him being home schooled by French and German tutors until he became 16 years old. Once he became this age, he enrolled in an Oriental language program at Kazan University. After several weeks he found that those studies were too demanding, so he switched his study to law instead. Coupled with switching his major and not getting his degree, Tolstoy had dropped out of Kazan University, he began to put his time into farming, as his father had done. In contrast to his father, Tolstoy also recorded entries in a diary type book. Which he would continue throughout his whole life. In 1848 Tolstoy joined his brother in the Russian Army, which was a base for his early pieces of writing. By looking at the the stories that Tolstoy wrote during the war you are able to see how the war influenced his writing in the following ways: (1) comparing his life while he’s in the war to his life outside of the war; (2) battling in the Crimean War, and (3) his interaction with the other