Leo Tolstoy

June 10 is the day in 1881 that Leo Tolstoy began a fateful pilgrimage to a nearby monastery. His great novels - War and Peace and Anna Karenina - had made him rich and famous, but he felt a hollow emptiness in his life, and fell into a deep depression. Then one day, alone on a walk in the woods, he had an epiphany: “At the thought of God, happy waves of life welled up inside me. Everything came alive, took on meaning. The moment I thought I knew God, I lived. But the moment I forgot him, the moment I stopped believing, I also stopped living.” The monastery became for him a place of spiritual retreat, at which he worked out the implications of his conversion. He decided to renounce meat, sex, alcohol, tabacco, and expensive clothing. He wanted to give away all his money, too, but his wife, Sophia, reminded him that they needed at least some resources to raise their 10 children! (from the SALT Blog)

You can read some of his short faithful writings here (pdf).