This volume includes "Family Happiness"; "The Kreutzer Sonata"; "The Devil" and "Father Sergius". The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. Tolstoy knows that his readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill the[...]

Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy, "Childhood, Boyhood, Youth", in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an 'awkward mixture of fact and fiction', generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth agai[...]

Considered by many to the greatest novel ever written, Tolstoy's masterpiece is a story of family life set against the backdrop of war. The novel begins in 1805, in the crowded and gossip-filled rooms of a St Petersburg party, and follows the fortunes of the aristocratic Bolkonsky and Rostov familie[...]

Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, "A Confession" is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. It describes his search for 'a practical religion not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth'. Although the Confession led to his ex-commu[...]

Leo Tolstoy's tragic Russian love story "Anna Karenina" is now the subject of a major new film adaptation from director Joe Wright ("Atonement, Pride and Prejudice"). Starring Keira Knightley ("A Dangerous Method") as "Anna Karenina", Jude Law ("Sherlock Holmes") as her husband Alexei, Aaron Johnson[...]

In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from the vast historical sweep o[...]

'To love him was not enough for me after the happiness I had felt in falling in love. I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.' Leo Tolstoy, known to the world for his famous novels, also created throughout h[...]

Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." [...]

Tolstoy's most famous novella is an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption, here in a powerful translation by the award-winning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Ivan Ilyich is a middle-aged man who has spent his life focused on his career as a bureaucr[...]

"Backgrounds and Sources" includes central passages from the letters of Tolstoy and his correspondents, S. A. Tolstoy s diaries, and contemporary accounts translated by George Gibian exclusively for this Norton Critical Edition. Together these materials document Tolstoy s writing process and chronic[...]

Tolstoy's tumultuous tale of passion and self-discovery marks a turning point in the author's career. His compelling, emotional saga recounts the effects of nonconformist behavior -- a society woman's adulterous affair and a landowner's unconventional quest for a meaningful existence -- against a ba[...]