Leo Tolstoy then spent much of his time in Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg, leading a lax and leisurely lifestyle. He began writing during this period, including his first novel "Childhood", a fictitious account of his own youth, which was published in 1852. In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War and was in Sevastopol during the 11-month-long siege of Sevastopol in 1854–55, including the Battle of the Chernaya. During the war he was recognised for his bravery
Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. "War and Peace" (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that "Anna Karenina" was his first true novel. After "Anna Karenina", Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) and "What Is to Be Done?" develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. For all the