Whatever else I am, I am the type of person who reads classic novels out of a sense of obligation. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist.

Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction.

Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.

And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving-and human-figures in world literature. War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.Īs Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds-peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers-as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. In Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind.

War and peace anthony briggs