Tolstoy...

A great change in his activities occurred from 1880 onward. He carefully examined, and ended by totally rejecting, the claims of the Russo-Greek Church, and incidentally those of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches also. For some years he devoted himself to an ardent study of the Gospels, rejecting the miraculous elements as well as all that seemed unreasonable or incomprehensible in them. From what remained, he constructed a consecutive narrative, which his vivid insight into the great problems of life renders interesting and suggestive, though his rendering is not always justified by the text. His object was to rescue what he believed to be the real teaching of Christ, and to combat what he thought the Church's false interpretations-a process which he has compared to " depolarizing a magnetized watch."

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After finishing Anna Karenina Tolstoy renounced all his earlier works and wrote Conversion (1879) to explain his doctrines. Voskresenia (1899, Resurrection) was Tolstoy's last major novel.

By this time, Tolstoy started to see himself more as a sage and moral leader than an artist. In 1901 the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated the author.

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