In an empire that was too hard to sustain, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy escapes the ruling elite of which he was belonging to in order to make it to the countryside but even there he sees the injustice that takes place specially among the very peasants he owned. In essence Tolstoy sees that a revolution is necessary but unlike other revolutionaries he is important in highlighting the fact that everyone wants to change the world but none is so much willing to change from within.

Following his belief that change ought to occur in the first place from within, Tolstoy becomes a type ascetic figure. He acknowledges that happiness is only real when shared, a devastating conclusion for people like Christopher McCandless who set out into the wild by himself, but he dies trying to escape the farm set-up in which his own family is based, so in a sense he also considers the wilderness as the ultimate revenue.