Tolstoy became consumed with that stick, but he never found it.

A poetic image for a story on Tolstoy, by Sam Abell.

Is it possible, all these years later, to say Tolstoy was right?

Knowing that Tolstoy was in their midst, they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history.

I was so thrilled to find an interview with the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, in a New York newspaper in the early 1900s.

And in it, Tolstoy told of a trip that he'd recently made to a very remote area of the Caucasus, where there were only wild barbarians, who had never left this part of Russia.

When Leo Tolstoy was five years old, his brother Nikolay came to him and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness on a little green stick, which he had hidden in a ravine on the family's estate in Russia.

For Marx, the class struggle in France created the circumstances in which a grotesque mediocrity that is, Napoleon was morphed into a hero. As far as Tolstoy was concerned, Napoleon was not a particularly good general, and was carried to victory by the courage and commitment of all of the individual French soldiers who won the Battle of Borodino.