Andrew Donskov’s Tolstoy and Tolstaya charts the couple’s life in letters. By Rowan Williams The 2009 film The Last Station, based on a fine book by Jay Parini and featuring Christopher Plummer and ...

Relief at being freed from the deadening Soviet tradition of grandiose literary anniversaries, and socialist realism’s didactic canonization of the Tolstoyan panoramic novel may have something to do ...

It is something of a paradox that people who are iconic figures in their own country sometimes come to represent the heritage of mankind. Human history is peopled with such homo universalis or the ...

The former railway station of Astapovo in Lipetsk region was a hive of activity this autumn as architects, builders, electricians and decorators raced to meet an immovable deadline. For it was here ...

Few lives have been more examined, not least by himself, than Lev Tolstoy’s. Born in 1828 into the Russian nobility, the future author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” had reasons to take ...

Sign up for the best picks from our travel, fashion and lifestyle writers. Count Lev Tolstoy led a life as epic as his fiction. You think War and Peace looks daunting ...

Few people know that high-profile Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wanted to transform Russia's education system. That's why he pinned his hopes on the future of children and dedicated time and attention to ...

Count Lev Tolstoy is one of those writers who was as fascinating and complex as his novels and stories. A man so awful and quarrelsome to those around him, especially his long-suffering wife, was ...