Leo Tolstoy

Before he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy opened an experimental school on his estate. What he did there, and what he made of it, set off a lifelong inquiry into the meaning and purpose of religion, literature, art, and life itself.

Daniel Moulin's study tells the story of Tolstoy's educational thought and shows how it relates to his fiction and his other writing. It begins with Tolstoy's own experience as a child and adolescent, and takes in his travels in Europe, the experimental school, his literature, and his views on art, philosophy, and spirituality.

This is a scholarly monograph about Tolstoy — not a work written by him. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2014 as part of the Bloomsbury Library of Educational Thought, the series edited by Richard Bailey.