Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...

Nikolai asks his animal friends to help him answer three important questions: "When is the best time to do things?" "Who is the most important?" and "What is the right thing to do?"

An alternative version – the one Tolstoy originally intended, but has been hitherto unpublished – of Russia's most famous novel; with a different ending, fewer digressions and an altered view of Napoleon – it's time to look afresh at one of the world's favourite books. 'War and Peace' is a masterpiece – a panoramic portrait of Russian society and its descent into the Napoleonic Wars which for over a century has inspired reverential devotion...

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 life.

Banned in Russia under Communism, A Calendar of Wisdom was Tolstoy's last major work, and one of his most popular both during and after

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One of the world's greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy was also the author of a number of superb short stories, one of his best known being “The Kreutzer Sonata.” This macabre story involves the murder of a wife by her husband. It is a penetrating study of jealousy as well as a piercing complaint about the way in which society educates men and women in matters of sex—a serious condemnation of the mores and attitudes of the wealthy, educated class....

Dissatisfied with his life of frivolity among the aristocracy of Moscow, young Dmitri Andreyevitch Oleynin sets out for the Caucasus region. Here, among the natural beauty of his surroundings and the honest and industrious peasant people, Oleynin hopes to obtain a more meaningful existence.

A collection of short stories from one of the most famous writers of very long novels Leo Tolstoy, including: Ilyas, Little Girls Wiser Than Men, The Coffee-House of Surat. 'For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.' Read in English, unabridged.

In the town of Surat, in India, was a coffee-house where many travellers and foreigners from all parts of the world met and conversed. One day a learned Persian theologian visited this coffee-house. He was a man who had spent his life studying the nature of the Deity, and reading and writing books upon the subject. He had thought, read, and written so much about God, that eventually he lost his wits became quite confused, and ceased even to believe...

Leo Tolstoy brings to light the struggle of finding true faith in this short story about a young man who desperately chases worldly accolades and social status before finding contentment in the last place he would have thought to look. After learning of the shame that he receives as catastrophic news, the young protagonist turns to the monastery to prove his moral superiority and his inability to be sullied by the ways of men. While outwardly he appears...

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--until ...