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50 free Leo Tolstoy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Leo Tolstoy trivia quiz covers the Russian count behind War and Peace and Anna Karenina, from the Yasnaya Polyana estate where he was born to the railway station where he died. The easy questions cover the two great novels, the nationality, the wife who copied out his manuscripts, the pacifism that inspired Gandhi and the Nobel Prize he never won. From there it moves through the life: the university that found him 'unable and unwilling to learn', the gambling debts, the artillery post at Sevastopol, the Paris execution that turned him against the state, the peasant schools, the thirteen children and the diaries he handed his bride. The harder end covers the Proudhon book that lent War and Peace its title, the 580 characters, the excommunication of 1901, the Doukhobors he helped emigrate, the slaughterhouse in Tula, the eggs he gave up in 1903, the Tolstoy Colony in South Africa, the lost 1901 film, and the Oscar-nominated pair who played him and Sonya in The Last Station. Every answer was checked against Tolstoy's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our classic literature and famous authors quizzes are the natural next stop.
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Q 01What was the name of the family estate where Tolstoy was born and spent most of his life?
Yasnaya Polyana
It lies 200 kilometres south of Moscow and is now a museum run by his great-great-grandson Vladimir.
Q 02What aristocratic title did Tolstoy hold?
Count
His mother was a princess, née Volkonskaya; the family title was granted by Peter the Great.
Q 03How old was Tolstoy when his mother died?
Two
His father died when he was nine, and he and his siblings were raised by relatives.
Q 04How did teachers at Kazan University describe the young Tolstoy?
'Both unable and unwilling to learn'
He was studying law and oriental languages, and left before finishing.
Q 05Why did Tolstoy go to the Caucasus with his brother and join the army in 1851?
He had run up heavy gambling debts
He served as an artillery officer and was promoted to lieutenant for courage in the Crimean War.
Q 06In which besieged city did Tolstoy serve as a young artillery officer for eleven months in 1854-55?
Sevastopol
His Sevastopol Sketches came out of it, and the horror helped stir his later pacifism.
Q 07What was Tolstoy's first published work, in 1852?
Childhood
It was a fictionalised account of his own youth, followed by Boyhood and Youth; he later dismissed the trilogy as sentimental.
Q 08What did Tolstoy witness in Paris in 1857 that marked him for the rest of his life?
A public execution
He wrote afterwards that the state was 'a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens'.
Q 09Which French anarchist's book, La Guerre et la Paix, gave Tolstoy the title of his masterpiece?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Tolstoy visited him in Brussels exile in March 1861 and called him the only man who understood the significance of education.
Q 10Which French novelist did Tolstoy meet in 1860-61, whose battle scenes influenced War and Peace?
Victor Hugo
Hugo had just finished Les Misérables.
Q 11After the serfs were freed, how many peasant schools did Tolstoy found on his estate?
13
Harassment by the Tsarist secret police cut the experiment short, but it is seen as a forerunner of Summerhill.
Q 12Whom did Tolstoy marry in September 1862?
Sophia Behrs, a court physician's daughter
She was sixteen years his junior; family called her Sonya.
Q 13How many children did the Tolstoys have?
13
Eight lived to adulthood; the youngest, Alexandra, became heir to his writings.
What did Tolstoy give his fiancée on the eve of their wedding?
Q 21Which author, asked to name the three greatest novels, replied 'Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, and Anna Karenina'?
William Faulkner
Woolf called Tolstoy 'the greatest of all novelists'; Flaubert exclaimed 'What an artist and what a psychologist!'
Q 22Whose The World as Will and Representation gave Tolstoy 'constant raptures' in summer 1869?
Arthur Schopenhauer
He quoted the book's final paragraph in Confession and took from it the ideal of voluntary poverty.
Q 23Which part of the Gospels most shaped Tolstoy's Christianity, with its command to turn the other cheek?
The Sermon on the Mount
His diaries detailing his sexual past
They revealed that a serf on the estate had borne him a son; the early marriage was nonetheless happy.
Q 15What role did Sonya Tolstaya play in the making of War and Peace?
She copied out the manuscript again and again
She was also his editor and financial manager; A. N. Wilson called their later marriage one of the unhappiest in literary history.
Q 16Roughly how many characters appear in War and Peace?
580
Tolstoy did not consider it a novel at all; he called Anna Karenina his first novel.
Q 17What did Tolstoy originally intend War and Peace to investigate?
The causes of the Decembrist revolt
The revolt is only reached in the last chapters, where Andrei Bolkonsky's son is set to become a Decembrist.
Q 18Tolstoy denied that War and Peace was a novel; what did he consider it instead?
An epic in prose
He called Anna Karenina his first novel.
Q 19Which Anna Karenina character is a philosophical landowner who works the fields, like Tolstoy?
Levin
Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei and Nekhlyudov are other self-portraits.
Q 20What did Tolstoy start hiding away while finishing Anna Karenina?
Guns and ropes, fearing he would kill himself
The crisis led to the spiritual awakening described in Confession.
He read it as a 'commandment of non-resistance to evil by force'.
Q 24Which Tolstoy work on nonviolent resistance directly influenced Mahatma Gandhi?
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Gandhi called Tolstoy 'the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced'.
Q 25What name did Gandhi give his second ashram in South Africa?
Tolstoy Colony
Their correspondence lasted barely a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death.
Q 26Which 1908 Tolstoy text, read by Gandhi, argued India could win independence through non-violence?
A Letter to a Hindu
Gandhi wrote asking for proof Tolstoy was really the author, which started their correspondence.
Q 27Which ancient Tamil text, read in German translation, bolstered Tolstoy's concept of non-violence?
The Tirukkural
He passed the idea on to Gandhi in his famous letter to India.
Q 28In which year was Tolstoy excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church?
1901
Resurrection was a major cause; his great-great-grandson's 2001 appeal to reverse it was refused.
Q 29Which economic philosophy, named for an American thinker, did Tolstoy champion in Resurrection?
Georgism
He and Henry George both rejected private property in land and a centrally planned economy.
Q 30Which persecuted pacifist sect did Tolstoy help emigrate to Canada in the 1890s?
The Doukhobors
He also inspired the Mennonites and became a supporter of Esperanto.