Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 into a Russian aristocratic family and died in 1910 at a rural railway station, having abandoned his home and estate at the age of 82 in a final attempt to live according to his beliefs. In between those two facts lies one of the most restless intellectual lives in literary history. He fought in the Crimean War, lived through the emancipation of Russian serfs, became a Christian anarchist and pacifist, renounced his own earlier literary fame, and wrote two novels that most critics would place in the top five works of world literature.
War and Peace (1869) follows five aristocratic families through the Napoleonic Wars. Anna Karenina (1878) follows an adulterous love affair in parallel with a story of agricultural reform and spiritual searching. Both are enormous, both reward rereading, and both are more accessible than their reputations suggest. If you've been putting off Tolstoy because you're afraid of the length, the secret is that both novels are propulsively plotted — Tolstoy is never boring. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is a 90-page novella about a man dying of a terminal illness and realizing he has wasted his life. It will affect you more than any two-hour novel you read this year.
Major Novels
The Novels
Best Starting Point
Read The Death of Ivan Ilyich first. It's 90 pages, free to read online, and the most concentrated version of what makes Tolstoy extraordinary. Then try Anna Karenina before War and Peace.
Novel
War and Peace
1869
Five families across the Napoleonic Wars — the most ambitious novel in world literature
Should I read War and Peace or Anna Karenina first?
Anna Karenina. It's more consistently focused, has a more obviously gripping central story, and is about 400 pages shorter than War and Peace. Once you've read it and understand how Tolstoy works — the interiority, the digressive authorial commentary, the parallel narrative structure — War and Peace becomes significantly easier to commit to.
Is War and Peace as hard to read as everyone says?
No. It is long — approximately 1,200 pages in most editions — but the battle sequences are vivid and exciting, the social scenes are sharply funny, and the characters are vividly drawn. The hardest part is the philosophical essays Tolstoy inserts, particularly near the end. Most readers skim those. You can too. The novel reads better than its reputation.