Tolstoy Leo

In order to repay a small debt, the young student Mitya is persuaded by a friend to falsify a bank bond and cash it in. Little does he suspect that this small misdemeanour will have a profound impact on the lives of many other people around him - indirectly even leading to the gravest of crimes. This in turn sets off a long journey towards...

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...

Hadji Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Caucasian struggle against the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling imam, Shamil. Hoping to protect his family, he joins the Russians, who accept him but never put their trust in him - and so Murat must find another way to end the...

Leo Tolstoy's most personal novel, Anna Karenina scrutinizes fundamental ethical and theological questions through the tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, “moral" life, standing for honesty and sincerity. Passion drives her to adultery, and this flies in the face of the corrupt Russian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile,...

THE ACCLAIMED TRANSLATION BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY. "If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it". (The Times). From sophisticated Moscow soirees to breathless troika rides through the snow, from the bloody front line at Austerlitz to a wife's death in...

TRANSLATED BY LOUISE AND AYLMER MAUDE. Anna is a beautiful, intelligent woman whose passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky leads her to ruin. But her story is also about a search for meaning, and by twinning it with that of Levin, an awkward idealist whose happy marriage and domestic trials form the backdrop for a similar quest, Tolstoy...