Leo Tolstoy

Russian novelist and moral thinker (1828-1910), author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He wrote realist fiction about families, war and conscience, and later became a religious and pacifist writer.

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About Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in Tula province. He died in 1910 at the small railway station of Astapovo, after leaving home. His first publication was the autobiographical Childhood in 1852. His Sevastopol Sketches came out of his army service in the Crimean War.

His fiction is realist and fixed on particulars. Britannica notes that War and Peace and Anna Karenina both treat ethics as a matter of sensitivity to specific people and situations, not rules applied from above. After Anna Karenina he fell into a spiritual crisis, which he describes in A Confession. He then turned to a literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount. His writing on nonviolent resistance, such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The Holy Synod excommunicated him in 1901, after Resurrection appeared.

War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878) and Resurrection (1899) are his three big novels. Anna Karenina ran first in the periodical The Russian Messenger. The Nobel archive lists him as a literature nominee in 1902 and 1903.

Start with Anna Karenina, in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. Two stories run side by side: Anna's affair with Count Vronsky, and the landowner Levin's search for a way to live. Penguin describes Levin as partly a self-portrait of the author. If you then want something short, try The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which Pevear and Volokhonsky also translated. If you want more of the epic scale, read War and Peace.

Published books

Author

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is a vast work of historical fiction. It follows several aristocratic Russian families through the Napoleonic era, from the campaign of 1805 to the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and the years after. Its three central figures are Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova. Their private searches for love, purpose and meaning unfold beside battles, court politics and the burning of Moscow. Tolstoy also steps back to argue about how history works and whether individual leaders really control events. The result is a landmark of Russian literature that combines a family chronicle, a war novel and a philosophical inquiry. This edition presents the book in the Pevear and Volokhonsky English translation.

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Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina follows two intertwined stories in 1870s Russia. In one, Anna, a married St. Petersburg aristocrat, enters a passionate relationship that her society will not forgive. In the other, the landowner Konstantin Levin searches for love, purpose and a workable way to live, in the countryside and in marriage. Tolstoy surrounds them with a wide circle of relatives and friends, using their marriages, ambitions and failures to examine fidelity, social judgment, faith and the meaning of ordinary days. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition presents the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of a landmark of Russian literature. It is also a sensible pick among classic novels to read for anyone ready for a long, absorbing realist novel.

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