Youth Leo Tolstoy - In Youth, Leo Tolstoys protagonistnow a fervent sixteen-year-oldeagerly prepares to strike out on his own. And as he does so, he begins to savor life in all its glory, both grand and miniscule. From his interactions with friends, old and new, to his perceptions of the beauty of nature, the young man has an entirely new world to look forward to. But harsh lessons are waiting to teach him that far-flung expectations are rarely fulfilled to the dreamers specifications, and that disappointment, anger, and grief are constant foes that must be contended with if one is to truly live. Youth concludes Tolstoys semiautobiographical trilogy, originally planned as a four-part series of novels tentatively called the Four Epochs of Growth. The completed works together form a remarkable expression of the great Russian novelists early voice and vision, which would ultimately make him one of the most renowned and revered authors in literary history.

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: ; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.