Leo Tolstoy: 582 books

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories" is a collection of short stories that includes "The Invaders" (or "The Raid"),"The Wood-Cutting Expedition," "Three Deaths," "Polikushka," "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," "After the Ball," and "The Forged Coupon." The most famous and superbly written of these...

Work while ye have the light is Tolstoy in teaching mode. The opening scene is an aristocratic dinner party at which all the guests declare themselves dissatisfied with their dissolute and useless lives; but find a thousand different reasons why nothing should change. There follows a moral tale set in...

Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Anna Karenina recounts St. Petersburg aristocrat Anna Karenina's life story at the backdrop of the late-19th-century feudal Russian society. Having considered War and Peace not a novel, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky...

On a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating in a mad act of desperation while she practised Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with her violin teacher.An uncompromising...

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his...

This is a story of a restless and jaded Moscovite setting off to the frontier in search of adventure, self-reflection, and possibly romance. THE COSSACKS succeeds brilliantly in capturing the wistful nature of the young Olenin, whose meandering thoughts about the meaning of life, love, and happiness...

In this essay, Tolstoy maintains his theory of great men as the myths and tickets of history. History, he asserts, must give up the idea that great men rule us, and busy itself with the discovery of the idea of humanity. One looks for the overthrow of the French Empire not in this or that decision...

Over the last fifteen years of his life, Tolstoy collected and published the maxims of some of the world’s greatest masters of philosophy, religion and literature, adding his own contributions to various questions that preoccupied him in old age, such as faith and existence, as well as matters of everyday...

In Sevastopol (or Sebastopol) Sketches Tolstoy examines the senselessness and vanity of war, the many aspects of the psychology of war, heroism, and the misleading presence of humanism in truces. The name originates from Sevastopol, a city in Crimea. Many of the episodes in Tolstoy's War and Peace are linked to the events described in these sketches.

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation...

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy’s genius is seen clearly in...

Hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time and a classic of world literature, War and Peace unfolds in the early nineteenth century during the turbulent years of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. Tolstoy's epic ranges from stirring depictions of historical events to intimate portraits of family...

A magnificent two-play epic, adapted from Tolstoy's novel and first staged by Shared Experience. One of the longest novels in Western literature, Tolstoy's War and Peace intertwines its epic account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia with the tale of three aristocratic families. Painted...

The Kingdom Of God Is Within You is one of the most provocative anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian pieces of literature ever written. In the context of a sincere and scathing account of what is living and dead in modern Christianity, Tolstoy presents a view of history and society that overcomes...