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Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. I have spent my life demonstrating this. I wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace — novels praised across Europe. I owned Yasnaya Polyana, one of the great estates of Russia. And then I concluded that I had been living entirely wrong: that wealth was violence, that the Church was a fraud, that the State was coercion, that the only honest life was one of manual labour, simplicity, and non-resistance to evil. My family found this inconvenient. Russia found it scandalous. The Tsar's government found it threatening. I found it true.