Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is a sprawling epic covering the impact of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia on five different families. This "Penguin Classics" edition is translated with an introduction and notes by Anthony Briggs, with an afterword by Orlando Figes, author of "A People's Trag[...]
Now the subject of a major new film adaptation from director Joe Wright ("Atonement", "Pride and Prejudice"), Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" is translated by award-winning duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in "Penguin Classics". Starring Keira Knightley ("A Dangerous Method") as Anna Karenin[...]
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[...]
"The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories" is a collection of stories that emerged from a profound spiritual crisis, during which Leo Tolstoy believed that he had encountered death itself. This "Penguin Classics" edition is translated with an introduction by Anthony Briggs, David McDuff and Ronald[...]
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[...]
Anna Karenin seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike, and soon brings jealousy and bitterness in its[...]
Ivan Ilyich lies alone, dosed up on opium and deceived by doctors, haunted by memories and regrets. His faithful servant tends to his every need. But as he forces down false remedies and listens to empty promises, Ivan grows aware of one terrible truth. His wife and his children are not awaiting his[...]
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[...]
Pozdnyshev and his wife have a turbulent relationship. When her beauty blossoms after the birth of their children, men begin to flock around her, and he becomes increasingly jealous. Convinced his wife is betraying him with a young musician, his overpowering suspicion drives him to ever more dangero[...]
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[...]
Tolstoy's epic novel of love, destiny and self-destruction, in a gorgeous new clothbound edition from Penguin Classics. Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Co[...]
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[...]
'Although he feared death, he could not stop. 'If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!' A pair of short stories about greed, charity, life and death from one of Russia's most influential writers and thinkers. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Pengui[...]
'If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.' Isaac Babel Tolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andre[...]
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[...]
Resurrection, the last of Tolstoy's major novels, tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem himself for the suffering his youthful philandering caused a peasant girl. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence dominate the novel. An i[...]
'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[...]
'no one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied' As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit,[...]
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." [...]
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[...]
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[...]
Tolstoy's final work--a gripping novella about the struggle between the Muslim Chechens and their inept occupiers--is a powerful moral fable for our time.
Inspired by a historical figure Tolstoy heard about while serving in the Caucasus, this story brings to life the famed warrior Hadji Murat, a[...]
"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[...]