September marks 197 years since Leo Tolstoy’s birth. Often considered the greatest of all novelists, he is best known for “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” but Tolstoy’s philosophy is just as important as his fiction. Pierre Bezukhov and Konstantin Levin are the author’s surrogate in those works, and much of their stories are spent searching for life’s meaning. They reach similar conclusions that life, love and God are intertwined, and that living humbly and doing good for others is the way to adhere to this view.

Tolstoy’s argument informs the thesis of “War and Peace,” that history is driven by “the unconscious hive life of mankind,” meaning that it is moved by a society’s collective psychology, and not great men like Napoleon.

As he completed “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy entered a midlife crisis and his views intensified. The idea that God was present in all of life led to pacifism and anarchism because he believed that law and social hierarchy depended on violence. He largely, though not entirely, abandoned fiction and became a moral teacher. Religious leaders called him a prophet, thousands flocked to adopt his lessons and he openly criticized Russia’s anti-Semitic programs.

Unfortunately, his spiritual turn hurt his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Sonya. She valued his fiction, which was acclaimed and profitable, and was distressed by his desire to give away the family’s wealth and his books’ copyrights. She also opposed his comparisons between organized religion and slavery, which caused the Russian Orthodox Church to excommunicate him. They went from partners to having one of the worst marriages in literary history, one that ended when Tolstoy died fleeing his wife.

Despite this negative impact, Tolstoy’s philosophy went on to inspire the nonviolent protests of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, furthering the cause of peace and equality.

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