Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910
Biography
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, known in English as Leo Tolstoy, was born in 1828 on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana in Tula province and died in 1910 at Astapovo railway station. Born into an aristocratic family, he served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, and his writing about the siege of Sevastopol brought him early fame.
War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection are often ranked among the greatest realist novels ever written. He also wrote novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata, along with short stories, plays and essays. After a crisis of meaning in the 1870s, he turned to a literal reading of the ethics of Jesus, centred on the Sermon on the Mount, and his later work argued for nonviolence and a form of Christian anarchism.
His ideas on nonviolent resistance reached far beyond Russia and shaped thinkers and activists such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He also backed Henry George's land-tax ideas, which find their way into Resurrection. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once but never received it.
Three of his books are in this library: Anna Karenina, a novel of an unhappy marriage and a passionate affair in Russian high society; Hadji Murat, a story published after his death about a mountain leader from the Caucasus who switched sides during the Russian conquest of the region; and The Kreutzer Sonata, a short novella about jealousy within a marriage.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Constance Garnett)
Anna Karenina is a novel, first published in book form in 1878, by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Often considered to be among the greatest works of world literature, Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel. It was initially released in serial installments from 1875 to…
Summary from Wikipedia: Anna Karenina (CC BY-SA 4.0)Sa Ano Nabubuhay Ang Tao
by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Sofronio G. Calderón)
A poor shoemaker sets out to buy a sheepskin for the winter and comes home instead with a naked stranger he found sitting behind a roadside chapel. The silent young man stays on as his apprentice and in six years smiles only three times, each time for a reason he will explain at…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude)
Leo Tolstoy's epic of 1869 follows the Bolkonsky, Rostov and Bezukhov families through Russia's wars with Napoleon, from Austerlitz to the burning of Moscow. A reader finds battlefields and ballrooms, and searching questions about history and how to live. This book uses the…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.What Men Live By, and Other Tales
by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude)
Tolstoy's late folk-style stories in Aylmer Maude's translation, including 'What Men Live By' and 'How Much Land Does a Man Need?'. A shoemaker, a peasant and a wandering angel meet simple dilemmas. Plain, moral and moving. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Анна Каренина
by Лев Николаевич Толстой
Anna, the wife of a senior official, falls in love with the officer Vronsky and gives up her marriage and her place in society for him. Beside her story Tolstoy sets that of Levin, a landowner seeking love, work and faith in the countryside. This book uses the racial and other…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Воскресение
by Лев Николаевич Толстой
Prince Nekhlyudov, serving as a juror, recognises the prostitute on trial for murder as the girl he once seduced and abandoned. He follows her to Siberia to atone for it, in Tolstoy's last novel.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Детство
by автор Лев Николаевич Толстой
A boy on a country estate remembers his lessons, his mother, his tutor and the day he first understood grief. Tolstoy's first published work is a tender, exact portrait of a child's inner life.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Крейцерова соната
by Лев Николаевич Толстой
On a train, a man tells strangers how jealousy drove him to kill his wife after he found her at music with a violinist. Tolstoy's story is a fierce attack on marriage and passion.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Смерть Ивана Ильича
by Лев Николаевич Толстой
Ivan Ilyich, a respectable judge, falls ill after a trivial accident and has to face the thought that his whole life has been wrongly spent. Tolstoy's novella follows his dying with merciless honesty.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Хаджи-Мурат
by Лев Николаевич Толстой
The Avar chieftain Hadji Murat quarrels with the imam Shamil and defects to the Russians, hoping to rescue his family, and finds the court of Nicholas I no kinder. Tolstoy's last novel, written in his seventies, is a clear-eyed picture of empire and of a proud man caught between…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.