Bøker av Leo Tolstoy

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 Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike, and soon brings jealousy and bitterness in its wake.

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.

'A book that you don't just read, you live' Simon SchamaAt 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 themes - conflict and love, birth and death, free will and faith - with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.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 Tragedy: Russian Revolution 1891-1924.'A masterpiece ... This new translation is excellent' Anthony Beevor

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 edifying and carefully selected pearls of wisdom.

Set against the backdrop of Russian high society, this novel charts the course of the doomed love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer who pursues Anna after becoming infatuated with her at a ball.

Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Introduction and Notes by E.B. Greenwood, University of Kent.Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density.Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels,- of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence. It ends tragically, and there is much that evokes despair, yet set beside this is an abounding joy in life's many ephemeral pleasures, and a profusion of comic relief.

This is a three-volume boxed set of Tolstoy's historical chronicle of Russia's struggle with Napoleon. The novel is an affirmation of life itself, focusing on the lives of individuals and the physical reality of human experience and its bewildering complexity.

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. In this revised and updated version of the definitive and highly acclaimed Maude translation, Tolstoy's genius and the power of his prose are made newly available to the contemporary reader.

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 excommunication, it also resulted in a large following of Tolstoyan Christians springing up throughout Russia and Europe. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

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.

This edition includes: The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Happy Ever After, and The Cossacks. Mortality was one of Tolstoy's most persistent themes, and all of the stories in this volume are connected by this preoccupation, along with the author's simultaneous attempt to help us improve our lives.

Anna Karenina is the story of a married socialite and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story opens when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing.

War and Peace charts the history of the French invasion of Russia, through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. War and Peace is well known as being one of the longest novels ever written and a central work of world literature.

A pairing of Tolstoy's most spiritual and existential works of fiction and nonfiction from the renowned translator of Turgenev and Chekhov.

'The Death of Ivan Ilyich - is usually regarded as an amazing narrative of the experience of dying, a search for the meaning of death. It is all that, and more: it's a great questioning of what is and what ought to be in a human life.' Nadine Gordimer

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 Chechen rebel who has fought fiercely and courageously against the Russian empire. After a feud with his commander he defects to the Russians, only to find that he is now trusted by neither side. He is first welcomed but then imprisoned by the Russians under suspicion of being a spy, and when he hears news of his wife and son held captive by the Chechens, Murat risks all to try to save his family. In the award-winning Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, Hadji Murat is a thrilling and provocative portrait of a tragic figure that has lost none of its relevance.

This intensely moving story of Ivan Ilyich's lonely end is one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy's late fiction.The ten other stories in this new collection include 'The Kreutzer Sonata', 'The Devil', and 'Hadji Murat' which has been described by Harold Bloom as 'the best story in the world'.

Tolstoy wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time.

The ten stories collected in this volume demonstrate Tolstoy's artistic prowess displayed over five decades - experimenting with prose styles and drawing on his own experiences with humour, realism and compassion. Inspired by his experiences in the army, 'The Two Hussars' contrasts a dashing father and his mean-spirited son. Illustrating Tolstoy's belief that art must serve a moral purpose, 'What Men Live By' portrays an angel sent to earth to learn three existential rules of life, and 'Two Old Men' shows a peasant abandoning his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to help his neighbours. And in the highly moving 'Master and Man', Tolstoy depicts a mercenary merchant travelling with his unprotesting servant through a blizzard to close a business deal - little realizing he may soon have to settle accounts with his maker.

'I'm not the sort of husband you dream of when you're walking alone along the avenue in the evening, am I? And it would be a disaster, wouldn't it?'How does love die? This question lies at the heart of Tolstoy's desperately sad novella. It tells the story of seventeen-year-old Masha who, despite their differences, falls passionately in love with an older man, and marries him. Soon, however, the gap between them becomes unbridgeable.