Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer widely regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He is best known for his long novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, considered by many critics as the greatest works of realist fiction. Tolstoy is also known for his short stories, semi-autobiographical works, essays, plays, and novellas.
Although Tolstoy was born into Russian nobility as the son of Princess Marie Volkonsky and Count Nicolas Tolstoy, later in life his beliefs became increasingly radical: he became a Christian anarchist and pacifist, giving up most of his possessions to live a simpler life that more resembled those of peasants.
In 1910, following an argument with his wife, Tolstoy fled his home to live in a monastery. He fell ill during the journey and died at a railway station. While Tolstoy was nominated several times for both the Nobel Prize for Literature and Nobel Peace Prize in the last decade of his life, he never won.
Anna Karenina was published in serial form from 1873-1877. It created a great stir in society?reports from the time claim that everyone in Russian Society was discussing the book and waiting eagerly for the next installment to appear. The critical...
In July of 1852, a young Count Leo Tolstoy sent his first work to the journal The Contemporary, which forever changed Russian literature. This work was a narrative, Childhood.
For many researchers of Tolstoy’s works, it remains a mystery how a...
The Death of Iv?n Ilych was published in 1886, several years after a period of depression and personal intellectual turmoil (1875-1878) that ended with Tolstoy's conversion to Christianity.
Tolstoy's Christianity is well known, but his ideas about...
Russian author Leo Tolstoy's 1872 short story "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" is about a young merchant who is sent to a Siberian prison camp for a murder he didn't commit. After putting his faith in God, the merchant spends twenty-six years in...
Hadji Murat is a relatively short novel written by Leo Tolstoy. This novel was published in 1912, after his death; Tolstoy's narrative falls under the category of historical fiction.
The novel pivots around a war in which a brave chieftain, Hadji...
“How Much Land Does a Man Need?” is one of Leo Tolstoy’s most gripping and affecting short stories. Published in 1886, the story examines the futility of chasing wealth, depicts the perils of greed and pride, and condemns corrupt economic...
"The Kreutzer Sonata" is Leo Tolstoy's novel, published in 1890 and immediately censored by the tsarist authorities. The book proclaims the ideal of abstinence and describes in the first person anger of jealousy. The name of the story gave number...
War and Peace was published as a serialized novel, completed in 1869. Famous for its girth and sprawling ambition, it merges historical fact with invented characters, and philosophy with fiction. For all these reasons, it initially baffled many...
