Tolstoy’s early life was the unremarkable round of a landed Russian gentlemen, although during it he produced his masterpieces War and Peace (1862–9) and Anna Karenina (1873–6). Around 1876 he underwent a Christian conversion, and from then onwards proclaimed an ascetic, self-denying and largely anarchistic gospel of renunciation and love, which influenced subsequent thinkers such as Gandhi. Works expounding this theme include among them A Short Exposition of the Gospels (1881), What I Believe In (1882), What Then Must We Do? (1886), and The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908).