Leo Nikolaievich Tolstoy
(1828 - 1910) Russia
Author
 Born of noble family at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, his first published work was Childhood (1852), part one of the trilogy which was composed with Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857). He fought in the Crimean War, and made his name with Tales from Sebastopol (1856). His masterpieces are War and Peace (1863-69), and Anna Karenina (1973-77).
 From 1880 Tolstoy underwent a profound spiritual crisis which led him to take up moral positions including passive resistane to evil, rejection of authority (religious or civil) and of private ownership, and a return to basic mystical Christianity.
His home bacme a place of pilgrimage, but he was excommunicated by the Ortodox Church and his later works were banned.
His desire to give up his property and live as a peasant disrupted his family life, and he finally fled his home and died of pneumonia at the railway station at Astapovo.
 A literary giant, Leo Tolstoy had homosexual attractions, which he describes both in his diary and in his autobiographical Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. He repressed these urges not only because his views on sex were Victorian, but also because he was attracted to men for their physical beauty, but to women because of their spiritual attributes!
Descriptions of the physical attraction between men appear in The Cossacks and Anna Karenina. By the time Tolstoy wrote his last novel, Resurrection, he had turned against all sexuality, and he portrayed homosexuality as one more symptom of the moral decay of society.
When he was 23, Tolstoy confided in his diary,
'I have never been in love with a woman... But I have quite often fallen in love with a man.'
Detailing one encounter involving a close male friend, he wrote:
'I shall never forget the night we left Pirogovo together, when, wrapped up in my blanket, I wanted to devour him with kisses and weep. Sexual desire was not totally absent.'
Later in life, Tolstoy became so enamored of one of his disciples, Vladimir Chertkov, that Tolstoy's wife, Sonya, publicly accused the two of being homosexual lovers.
Source: Rutledge, L. The Gay Book of Lists. Alyson, 2003 edition, p. 86
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