Lev Tolstoy

In my dissertation I covered Lev (Leo) Tolstoy. Lev means "lion" in Russian and Tolstoy means "thick".  Most people recall his novels "War and Peace" and Anna Karenina."  Lev was an orphan and wrote a book called "Childhood." This text became the ideal concept in the Russian mind of the joy of childhood without adult responsibilities. His parent died while he was still young. The family took in Lev and four others. In university he was considered unteachable. He went through a spiritual transformation and actually wrote to help the Russian church. He was excommunicated for his radical ideas. One of his Christian ideas was the non-violent resistance to government. Violence was not allowed in the scriptures and he considered governments as corrupted and holding too much power. Of interesting note is his writings influenced Mahatma Gandhi, James Bevel, Martin Luther King, Jr.