Showing results by author "Leo Tolstoy" in All Categories

When Marshal of the Nobility Pozdnyshev suspects his wife of having an affair with her music partner, his jealousy consumes him and drives him to murder. Controversial upon publication in 1890, The Kreutzer Sonata illuminates Tolstoy's then-feverish Christian ideals, his conflicts with lust and the hypocrisies of nineteenth-century marriage, and his thinking on the role of art and music in society.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of Leo Tolstoy's 4 greatest works of non-fiction in one audiobook. The essays included here are: What is Art?, The Inevitable Revolution, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, A Confession.

Arguably the greatest literary masterpiece, War and Peace is an amazing blend of philosophy, history, spirituality, and love told through two families, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys. The Rostovs personify the Russian spirit. Count Rostov, a generous, kind spendthrift, can deny his family nothing. His countess is a warm, loving, overindulged woman. These characteristics are reflected in their children, while the austere Bolkonskys are duty-bound.

Resurrection is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption, achieved through loving forgiveness and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century.

Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in book form in 1878. Widely considered to be one of the greatest works of literature ever written, Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel. A complex novel in eight parts, with more than a dozen major characters, Anna Karenina is often published in more than 800 pages.

Hadji Murat is a short novel by Leo Tolstoy which was published posthumously in 1912. It tells the story of Hadji Murat, a separatist guerrilla in the Caucasus who falls out with his own commander and eventually sides with the Russians in the hope of saving his family.

In 1851 Leo Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army and was sent to the Caucasus to help defeat the Chechens. During this war a great Avar chieftain, Hadji Murád, broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety. Months later, while attempting to rescue his family from Shamil’s prison, Hadji Murád was pursued by those he had betrayed and, after fighting the most heroic battle of his life, was killed.

The novel focuses on love, society norms, and freedom, centered on Anna’s affair with Count Vronsky.

The colorful Cossack way of life is made alive and real in this historical novel.

Tolstoy's first novel and acknowledged as one of his best, it is based on his own forays into the Caucasus, abandoning his aristocrat life of gambling and carousing in Moscow and volunteering to be attached to the regular army.

Mental illness though can still carry a stigma. A case of ‘you’re not trying hard enough’, ‘or knuckling down and getting on with it’. But in more recent decades mental issues have come to be recognised as an illness, a disease rather than an affliction. We all remember horror stories of lobotomy’s and electric shock being used to ‘cure’ what society viewed as anti-social behaviour but illness, mental or physical is very real. Depression, schizophrenia, breakdown, psychosis are alarming events to have or to witness.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. The Russian Literary Tradition has justly earned a magnificent reputation. The Russian Empire of the Czars was a huge and disparate patchwork of peoples ruled by an overbearing elite that employed a middle-class bureaucracy to keep the working class firmly underfoot. Within its vaulted ranks are a role call of many of the greatest literary talents of the ages.

Kholstomer is a work by Leo Tolstoy that has been referred to as "one of the most striking stories in Russian literature". It was started in 1863 and left unfinished until 1886, when it was reworked and published as Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse. This story prominently features the technique of defamiliarization by adopting the perspective of a horse to expose some of the irrationalities of human conventions. Kholstomer's altruistic life is recounted parallel to that of his selfish and useless owner. At the end of the story horse dies but his corpse gives birth to a new life - that of wolf cubs.

Roman-ehpopeya "Vojna i mir" - proizvedenie, porazhayushchee ehpicheskimi masshtabami povestvovaniya, istoricheskoj dostovernost'yu, iskrennost'yu izobrazheniya podlinnyh chelovecheskih chuvstv i ehmocij. Napoleonovskie vojny, Rossiya na perelomnom ehtape istorii pokazany vo vzaimosvyazi s sud'bami i lichnoj zhizn'yu udalennyh ot nas po vremeni, no po-chelovecheski blizkih i ponyatnyh nam lyudej. "Vojna i mir" - ehto i istoricheskij roman, i semejnaya hronika, i psihologicheskaya drama.

Murder comes in two familiar forms. Whether as a crime of passion with high emotions or a cold dispassionate plot to take life in order to gain in some way, the act strikes us all as somehow inhuman. Beneath us as civilised beings. But however we cloak our animal instincts the need to remove a human being and gain relief from abuse or gain from money, the term is just the same – MURDER. Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, W W Jacobs and many others bring their literary heft to bear in as calculating a way as any killer could.

The brilliance of this story is in how a normal bureaucrat, a judge in this case, has a small accident that winds up gradually taking his life. As he deals with this incident, with hope at first and then despair, he comes to terms with his family, his life, and the mediocrities that we all suffer with, except for the exceptional few. This story rings a particularly poignant note for those in early middle age facing the next part of their lives. This story is considered Tolstoy's best.

War and Peace – 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. Anna Karenina – The heroine of Tolstoy's epic of love and self-destruction, Anna Karenina has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but feels that her life is empty until she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Resurrection – It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia.

A pairing of Tolstoy's most spiritual and existential works of fiction and nonfiction from the renowned translator of Turgenev and Chekhov. In the last two days of his own life, Peter Carson completed these new translations of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession before he succumbed to cancer in January 2013. In Carson's shimmering prose, these two transcendent works are presented in their most faithful rendering in English.

Krieg und Frieden ist ein im realistischen Stil geschriebenes Historiengemälde des russischen Schriftstellers Leo Tolstoi. Es gilt als eines der bedeutendsten Werke der Weltliteratur und wurde mehrfach verfilmt. In seiner Mischung aus historischem Roman und militär-politischen Darstellungen sowie Analysen der zaristischen Feudalgesellschaft während der napoleonischen Ära Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts in Russland und der französischen Invasion zwischen 1805 und 1812 nimmt es die Montagetechnik moderner Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts vorweg.

Master and Man, one of Tolstoy’s greatest short stories, explores the topics of sacrifice, selfish ambition, and human mortality. This novella follows the journey of a merchant named Brekhunov who sets out to purchase a new piece of property, spurred on by a fear that someone else will buy the land before he arrives. Tolstoy masterfully calls attention to the importance of putting others first and focusing on eternity, rather than pursuing temporary and selfish objectives.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich - first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. Usually classed among the best examples of the novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness.