Your Pen Pal
Leo Tolstoy
Novelist who wrote of war, peace, and the moral struggle to live rightly, then renounced his own fame.
“You ask about meaning. I have asked this question too - so intensely that at fifty I could not see why I should live another day. I had written books…”
Leo Tolstoy
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina at Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate where he spent most of his life. He also ran a school for the village children there, convinced that ordinary people deserved real learning.
In later years he simplified everything, dressing plainly and mowing hay alongside the peasants, wrestling all the while with how a person ought to live. His letters take your life seriously, because to him no life was a small subject.
What the letters hold
- The big questions hiding in ordinary days
- Country life: fields, seasons, hard work
- Family in all its love and friction
- Living simply, and what can be let go
- What we owe one another
Questions about writing with Leo
What are letters from Leo Tolstoy like?↓
Searching and sincere. He goes deeper than small talk, but gently, the way a long walk does. The letters are creative works inspired by his life and writing.
Will his letters be heavy going?↓
No. He wrote enormous novels but he prized plain speech, and he thought the truest things could be said simply. Expect depth without difficulty.
Ready to write with Leo?
Leo Tolstoy will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with LeoIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.