Where to Start with Leo Tolstoy: A Reading Guide

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) is the novelist most frequently named by other novelists as the greatest who has ever lived. His two major novels — Anna Karenina and War and Peace — are the fullest achievements of the realistic tradition in fiction: works that render the entire range of human experience, from the most intimate psychology to the broadest social and historical forces, with equal precision and equal authority. His shorter fiction — The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Hadji Murat — is among the most perfectly constructed in world literature.

Where to Start

The Best Entry Point: Anna Karenina (1877)

The universally recommended starting point. Anna Karenina is the most approachable of Tolstoy’s long novels — its double plot (Anna’s tragedy, Levin’s search) is immediately engaging, its characters are rendered with extraordinary intimacy, and its account of the emotional logic that drives people toward destruction is as precise as psychology. The novel begins with one of the great opening sentences (‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’) and maintains that level of insight across its 800 pages. Readers who have never read a very long novel often find that Anna Karenina makes them understand why such novels exist.

The Masterpiece: War and Peace (1869)

Tolstoy’s greatest achievement — a novel of such breadth and intimacy that it creates a world rather than a story. The Rostov, Bolkonsky, and Bezukhov families live through the Napoleonic invasion of Russia; Natasha’s youth and love, Prince Andrei’s philosophical crisis, Pierre’s journey through dissolution and eventual peace are the personal stories set against the great historical events. Tolstoy’s account of how individuals experience history — as confused, terrifying, and often entirely unlike what generals think is happening — is the greatest achievement in historical fiction. The philosophical chapters on historical causation can be skimmed; the narrative sections require full attention.

Best approached after: Anna Karenina. Readers who have discovered that they can inhabit Tolstoy’s world will find the longer novel’s scale a pleasure rather than a challenge.

The Essential Short Fiction: The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)

Tolstoy’s most perfect short work — a novella of about 80 pages that follows a successful judge through his illness and dying, and through the terror and spiritual awakening that his dying produces. Ivan Ilyich has lived a conventional, successful, entirely unexamined life, and his dying is the first experience that cannot be managed through social convention. The novella is Tolstoy’s most concentrated statement of his philosophy of authentic life; it is also one of the most powerful accounts of dying in literature. An ideal introduction to Tolstoy for readers who want his depth without the length.

Resurrection (1899)

Tolstoy’s final novel — written after his religious and moral conversion, when he had renounced the literary ambitions of his early career. Prince Nekhlyudov, who seduced and abandoned the servant girl Katyusha Maslova in his youth, encounters her as a defendant in a trial over which he is serving as a juror, and attempts to rescue and then marry her in atonement. The novel is Tolstoy’s most explicit social critique (of the judicial system, the prison system, the Orthodox Church, private property) and the least concerned with the psychological complexity of his earlier work. Essential reading for completists; for new readers, begin with Anna Karenina.

Reading Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s extraordinary quality — the quality that makes other writers describe him as in a different category from all novelists — is his ability to render the full complexity of a human moment: not just what a character thinks and feels but the physical sensations, the social context, the gap between what is felt and what can be said, and the way that one moment flows into the next. His sentences are long and syntactically complex, but always earned; they are doing the work of rendering consciousness rather than performing style. Reading Tolstoy slowly — attending to each sentence — is the only approach; and readers who do so consistently report that he makes other novels seem thin by comparison.