Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his aristocratic family's estate south of Moscow. He made his name in his twenties with the semi-autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (1852–1856) and with Sevastopol Sketches (1855), drawn from his time as a young artillery officer during the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War.

War and Peace, set during the Napoleonic Wars, mixes its story with chapters in which Tolstoy argues about history and philosophy; an early version ran serially from 1865 before he rewrote it for book publication in 1869. Anna Karenina appeared in installments from 1875 to 1877, mostly in The Russian Messenger, and as a book in 1878; Tolstoy called it his first true novel. A moral crisis in the 1870s, described in Confession (1882), led him to a literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount, Christian anarchism and pacifism, and The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. His later fiction includes The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and Resurrection (1899). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 but never won, and he died in 1910 at Astapovo railway station.

Start with The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). It is a novella, written shortly after his religious conversion, and it is a short way to find out whether his style suits you before committing to a long novel. Then read Anna Karenina before War and Peace. Anna Karenina has a contemporary setting and two main threads, Anna's and Levin's, the latter a character Tolstoy modeled on himself, so it is easier to keep hold of.

Go to War and Peace knowing that it moves between family life, Napoleon's headquarters, the court of Alexander I and the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino, and that some chapters are essays rather than story. A complete modern translation with a character list helps, since Russian names and nicknames vary.