Leo Tolstoy

Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolsoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late 19th century Russian society.

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 shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

Set against the backdrop of a vast country under dire threat and containing fourteen hundred pages, five hundred characters, and a serious attempt to resolve the questions of how best to live life, this is the basis of the world's finest novel, War and Peace.

It is first and foremost a cornucopia of compelling narrative entertainment on a grand scale, but on a more personal level there are a series of moving stories brimming with intimate detail and with shocking relevance to our own lives and times.

Now available is a new translation of this great classic, the first for half a century, and the first by a man for more than a hundred years. The idiom has been sensitively updated, so as not to betray the original through the vulgarity of sweeping modernisation, but instead to alter the tone gently from the delicate, upper-class English of earlier versions to the kind of vigorous, ordinary speech, which directly reflects Tolstoy's demotic Russian.

This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the frontiers of nineteenth-century Russia -- completed in 1862, when Tolstoy was in his early thirties -- has always surprised readers who know Tolstoy best through the vast, panoramic fictions of his middle years.

This profound analysis of the nature of art is the culmination of a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice, and religion. Considering and rejecting the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty, Tolstoy perceives the question of the nature of art to be a religious one.

Part of a larger anthology entitled The Sunday Reading Stories, this book was suppressed by the Bolsheviks. As the last major work of one of the literary titans of the 19th century, these brief fictional tales are designed to help us think through the implications of our faith.

By the time he was fifty Tolstoy had already written War and Peace and Anna Karenin, novels that would assure him of immortality. He had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was 'a happy man' and in good health, yet life had lost all meaning. ,em>A Confession (1879), a poignant fragment of autobiography, described a crisis familiar to many people. It records Tolstoy's depression and estrangement from the world, his desperate desire to find answers to the simplest questions of life and the beginnings of his passionate intellectual search for 'a practical religion not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth.

Despite having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, at the age of 51, looked back on his life and considered it a meaningless, regrettable failure. A Confession provides insight into the great Russian writer's movement from the pursuit of aesthetic ideals toward matters of religious and philosophical consequence. Authentic and genuinely moving, this memoir of midlife-spiritual crisis was first distributed in 1872 and marked a turning point in the author's career as a writer: in subsequent years, Tolstoy would write almost exclusively about religious life, especially devotion among peasantry.

Leo Tolstoy (18281910) was the author of such classic Russian novels as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In mid-life, he underwent a deep moral and spiritual crisis that led him back to the Gospels in an effort to conform his life to the spirit of Christ. This volume focuses on his "spiritual writings"---autobiographical reflections on his journey of faith, commentaries on the Gospels, essays on the essence of Christianity, and timeless wisdom regarding the meaning of human existence.