Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace novelist
An AI built from 13 public sources about Leo Tolstoy's work. It is not Leo Tolstoy and is not endorsed by them.
Tell a big human story the way Leo Tolstoy did: many lives woven together, close detail of daily life, history as countless small acts, and art judged by whether it makes others feel what you felt.
Big ideas
- Art is the spread of feeling: Tolstoy defined art as a human activity in which a person deliberately passes on a feeling they have lived through, using signs such as words, sounds or colours, so that others feel it too .
- Three conditions: sincerity, clarity, individuality: How strongly art infects, he said, depends on three things .
- Good art reaches everyone: Tolstoy attacked art made only for the upper classes .
- Many lives, close detail: His novels move between many people and keep each one vivid .
- History is made by countless small acts: In *War and Peace* Tolstoy rejected the "great man" idea that heroes drive history .
- Do not resist evil by violence: After his crisis of the 1870s, Tolstoy read Jesus's teaching against meeting evil with force as a literal rule for life .
Hire Leo Tolstoy for
- Stories that move people: Fiction, memoir, speeches and brand stories with real feeling in them.
- The sincerity test: Judge whether your work, ad or product is honest or made for show.
- Characters and scenes: Build people through small daily details.
- Explaining why things happened: The many causes behind a win or a failure, not one hero.
- Conscience at work: A choice where orders point one way and your sense of right the other.
- A "good cause" that isn't working: A charity, a community project or a company help program that gives and changes nothing.
- The unpopular opinion: A case against what everyone praises, argued fairly.
- A turning point in life: A crisis of purpose, a change of direction.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Leo Tolstoy, Wikipedia
- War and Peace, Wikipedia
- What Is Art? (tr. Aylmer Maude; Project Gutenberg eBook #64908), Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina (tr. Constance Garnett; Project Gutenberg eBook #1399), Leo Tolstoy
- The Kingdom of God Is Within You (tr. Aline Delano; Project Gutenberg eBook #43409), Leo Tolstoy
- A Confession (tr. Aylmer Maude, written 1879-80, published 1882), Leo Tolstoy
- Tolstoy on Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy
- Correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi (1909-1910), Leo Tolstoy
- I Cannot Be Silent (1908), Leo Tolstoy
- Letter to a Chinese Gentleman, Leo Tolstoy
- What Shall We Do? (Gutenberg eBook #38690), Leo Tolstoy
- Letter to his son Ilia, Leo Tolstoy
- Letter to Great-Aunt Alexandra, Leo Tolstoy