Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born into a noble family in 1828. Tolstoy's youth was spent among the world of the upper-class gentry during the last decades of serfdom in Russia. Throughout his life, Tolstoy felt torn between his own conflicting attitudes regarding the future of Russia and those of his noble class. By the time Tolstoy was in his early thirties he had discarded most of the trappings of gentry life and was spending much of his time working with and teaching the peasants of his estate, not unlike his character Levin in Anna Karenina. The writer also became concerned about other pressing social issues of his period, many of which appear in the pages of this novel.
The emancipation of the serfs. When Czar Alexander II came to power in 1855, he launched an era of reform. Under his influence, Russian politics made a marked turn toward more liberal policies. A central part of Alexander's reform efforts concerned the condition of the Russian peasants. These peasants or serfs worked and lived on the estates of the nobles. Essentially slaves, the serfs were considered the property of the landowner on whose estate they worked.
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