About This Book

. . . it was the same story, all the people had to be narrowly investigated before they could be helped. But unfortunates of the sort whom a gift of money would convert from unfortunate into fortunate people, there were none. Mortifying as it is to me to avow this, I began to get disenchanted, because I did not find among these people any thing of the sort which I had expected. I had expected to find peculiar people here; but, after making the round of all the apartments, I was convinced that the inhabitants of these houses were not peculiar people at all, but precisely such persons as those among whom I lived. . .

About Leo Tolstoy

A harsh social critic, though not a reformer, Tolstoy believed that the society he lived in was absolutely corrupt and corrupting, as was all society everywhere. He believed in absolute equality and that his first duty was to abstain from living by the work of others and from taking part in the "organized violence" of Government. Attempting to live like his peasants and with them, he became estranged from most of his family and remained so until the time of his death. He is considered one of the most important names in Russian Literature, largely on the basis of his two greatest literary works: War and Peace. and Anna Karenena.