LEO TOLSTOY

Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 10, 1910)
began tussling with the grandest questions of existence from an early age. As a young man, he struggled through his search for himself, learned the hard way about the moral weight of immoral motives, and confronted the meaning of human existence.
By late middle age, his work had gained him worldwide literary acclaim, but had also managed to antagonize both church and state at home — the Russian government found his social, political, and moral views so worrisome that they censored him heavily and threatened imprisonment, while the Orthodox Church was so offended by his spiritual writings that they eventually excommunicated him.

What his homeland withheld the world gave and gave heartily — especially England, where a small but spirited Tolstoy fan base had mushroomed. The author’s devoted secretary and supporter, Vladimir Chertkov, who had landed in London in 1897 after being exiled from Russia, invested his resources and his enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s writing in the Free Age Press — a visionary publishing outfit he founded in Dorset, as spiritually and morally idealistic as Tolstoy himself, dedicated to promoting “reason, justice, and love” and “spreading the deepest convictions of the noblest spirits of every age and race.”
The Free Age Press operated from the belief that life has an essential spiritual dimension and that “man’s true aim and happiness consists in unity in reason and love in place of the present insane and unhappy struggle which is bringing and can bring real good to no one.”