Drawn from War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Master and Man, Walk in the Light, and Twenty-Three...

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 struggle.

Tolstoy knew as he was writing this, his last work of fiction, that it would not be published in his lifetime, and so gave an uncompromising portrayal of the Russians' faults and the nature of the rebels' struggle. In the process, he shows a...

One of Tolstoy's last published works of fiction, The Devil revolves around the young landowner Yevgeny's irrepressible lust for Stepanida, a sensual peasant woman. Even when he gets married to a respectable upper-class lady, he finds himself unable to put an end to his encounters with Stepanida, and becomes increasingly consumed by guilt and helplessness in the face of his urges.

In some ways comparable to the controversial Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil shows Tolstoy at his most salacious, and addresses the conflicts between desire, social norms and personal conscience. Also included...

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 Calendar of Wisdom was Tolstoy's last major work, and one of his most popular both during and after his lifetime. This new translation by Roger Cockrell will offer today's generation of readers the chance to discover, day by day, these...

Anna Karenina is a beautiful and intelligent woman, whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society around her. Her love affair with Vronsky is played out alongside the developing romance between Kitty and Levin, and in the character of Levin, closely based on Tolstoy himself, the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical significance.

One of the greatest novels ever...

At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey, and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand...

Framed for murder, the maid, Maslova, is convicted of the crime and sent to Siberia. Nekhlyudov goes to visit her in prison, meets other prisoners, hears their stories, and slowly comes to realize that all around his charmed and golden aristocratic world, yet invisible to it, is a much larger world of oppression, misery and barbarism. Story after story he hears and even sees people chained without cause, beaten without cause, immured in dungeons for life without cause, and a twelve-year-old boy sleeping in a lake of human dung from an overflowing latrine because there is no other place on...