Character Catalog

An epic fresco of 1,500 pages tracing the Napoleonic Wars through the destinies of Russian aristocratic families. Considered one of the greatest novels in world literature.

A novel about adultery and the condition of women in 19th-century Russian society. Dostoevsky called it a flawless work.

A masterly novella about a judge confronted with his imminent death, which forces him to question the meaning of his bourgeois life. A masterpiece of psychological realism.

Tolstoy's last great novel, a scathing critique of justice, the Church, and Russian society, told through the story of a prince seeking to repair a past injustice.

A spiritual autobiography in which Tolstoy recounts his existential crisis and his conversion to a radical form of Christianity, rejecting dogma and ecclesiastical institutions.

A major theoretical essay in which Tolstoy defines art as the transmission of sincere feelings and condemns much of the elitist art of his time, including some of his own works.

Three short stories drawn from his direct experience of the Crimean War, which revealed to the world a new realistic and anti-heroic perspective on warfare.

History is the life of peoples and of humanity. To grasp and express in words — that is, to describe — the life not only of humanity but even of a single people, seems impossible.

I am ugly, awkward, untidy and lacking in social graces. I am irritable, tiresome to others, immodest, intolerant and as bashful as a child.

The further you advance in your work, the more I rejoice in reading your writings. Your question about what I think of your passive resistance activity… Love, that is to say the desire for the good of men, expressed through action, is the supreme and sole law of human life.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

My life had come to a stop. I could breathe, eat, drink, sleep, I could not help doing these things; but there was no real life in me, because there were no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable.

The Tolstoy family estate, located 200 km south of Moscow, where Leo was born, lived, and wrote almost his entire body of work. Now a national museum, it draws thousands of visitors every year.

Tolstoy took part in the Siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855) during the Crimean War. This experience of real warfare directly fed into his writing in the Sevastopol Sketches and later in War and Peace.

A central setting in Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Moscow represents in Tolstoy's work Russian aristocratic society with its balls, intrigues, and moral hypocrisy.

The small railway station where Tolstoy died on November 20, 1910, following his nocturnal flight from Yasnaya Polyana. His death was the first global media event captured on film by movie cameras.

The imperial capital where Tolstoy was introduced into literary circles through Turgenev in the 1850s. He maintained a complex relationship with the city, which he associated with bureaucracy and artificiality.

Tolstoy wrote his manuscripts with a quill pen, covering thousands of pages in his small, dense handwriting. He rewrote War and Peace seven times, producing a considerable volume of handwritten text.

Convinced that manual labor was morally superior to intellectual work, Tolstoy plowed his fields with a plow alongside his peasants, a gesture that symbolized his Tolstoyan philosophy of returning to the land.

Tolstoy learned shoemaking to craft his own boots, rejecting aristocratic luxury. He often gave pairs of boots to his visitors as a symbolic gift.

The samovar, a traditional Russian copper kettle, was the center of family life at Yasnaya Polyana. Around the evening tea gathered family, visitors, and intellectuals who came from all over the world.

Tolstoy read and annotated the Gospels in Greek, developing his own vision of Christianity stripped of all dogma. He wrote a personal version of the Gospels, which was censored by the Church.

At over sixty years old, Tolstoy learned to ride a bicycle, a gift from the Moscow Cycling Society. He considered this physical activity perfectly compatible with his philosophy of simple living.