Leo Tolstoy

Dmitry Andreich Olenin, in the hope of escaping the hollowness of his privilege, joins the army and heads to the Caucasus. There among the foothills, he will meet the Cossacks: a people he considers to be at one with the land. In their company he will hunt, he will drink, he will fall in love and, s....

Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels of destiny....

‘How truth thickens and deepens when it migrates from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening is one of the thrills of Tolstoy’s stories’ Sharon Cameron in her preface to The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other StoriesTolstoy wrote in many genres for different audiences. In this, th....

This powerful novel, Tolstoy’s third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, cha....

"War and Peace" is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov,....