Leo Tolstoy corresponded with Gandhi.
Their letters lasted only a year, until Tolstoy's death in 1910, but Gandhi named his South African community Tolstoy Farm and called Tolstoy the greatest apostle of non-violence.
The events
- Tolstoy's War and Peace1869 · Yasnaya Polyana. In 1869 the final volume of Leo Tolstoy's epic, written at his Yasnaya Polyana estate, was published. Its panorama of Russian society during the Napoleonic Wars is counted among the greatest novels in world literature.
- Gandhi's Salt March1930 · Dandi. In March and April 1930 Mahatma Gandhi and his followers walked about 390 km to the sea at Dandi to make salt in defiance of the British monopoly. The act of nonviolent civil disobedience drew worldwide attention to India's struggle for independence.
More amazing facts
- 1908 1908: the Tunguska blast flattened 2,000 km² of Siberian forest, and the Messina earthquake killed some 80,000 people.
- 1908 · 1927 The Tunguska 'meteorite' left no crater.
- 1908 · 1961 · 1967 The last Emperor of China lived to see Gagarin fly. Puyi took the throne in 1908 aged two, abdicated in 1912 and died in 1967 as an ordinary citizen of the People's Republic who had worked as a gardener and an editor.
- 1908 Tea bags, the popular story goes, were an accident.
- 1909 · 1915 There are colour photographs of the Russian Empire over a century old. In 1909–1915 Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky toured the country in a darkroom railway car provided by Nicholas II, shooting everything through three colour filters.
- 1910 In 1910 people bought 'comet pills'. Astronomers had found poisonous cyanogen in Halley's Comet's tail, which Earth was due to pass through, and hucksters sold pills and gas masks.