Reading Comprehension

Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions below.

In 1828, baby Leo was born into the rich and powerful Tolstoy family of Central Russia. He would grow up to write two of the greatest novels in the history of literature and inspire social reform that would make an impact on the world. Not just another Russian author, Leo Tolstoy was a teacher, a philosopher, and the grandfather of non-violent revolution.

Tolstoy was an unsettled young man. He was a poor student who left his university when he could find no meaning in his studies. He joined the army but could not endure the violence and soon left that as well. By this time, Tolstoy was being noticed as a writer, but he still felt unfulfilled. During this time, Tolstoy wrote his most famous books, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In them, Tolstoy offered a new kind of fiction to Russian readers. He described events and characters so detailed and convincing that they blurred the line between the imaginary and real life. In Tolstoy’s version, it was not great leaders that moved history, but the common people. His work has been called “not art, but a piece of life.”

Tolstoy suffered a mid-life crisis after writing Anna Karenina. Giving up his fortune to live among the peasants, he decided he must find the meaning of life or else kill himself. What he found came from the core of his Christian faith—universal love and passive resistance to evil. Gandhi later adopted this message in his campaign to free India. Martin Luther King, Jr. did the same in his fight for racial equality in America. The effects of passive resistance can still be felt today. Tolstoy was a gifted writer, but it was his revolutionary ideas that changed the course of history and the world in which we live.