Leo Tolstoy

“Tolstoy was taken up by anarchists globally. He’s the most translated anarchist in China and Japan, and had a big influence on Mahatma Gandhi in India.” Read more...

The best books on Anarchism

Ruth Kinna, Philosopher

“Tolstoy famously said of War and Peace that it wasn’t even a novel. In a sense, it’s a total history of that epoch in Russia in a fictional form…It’s very interesting what happens with the novel linguistically. There’s been a study of the French words in the novel, because there are a large number, and they feature particularly in the early phases of the novel. Towards the end, the novel becomes more Russian in its literary and vernacular style, in its lexicon and syntax. In a sense, the Russian language is the true character of the novel. The growing Russianness of the language is the epiphany, that moment of self-discovery, that the Russian aristocracy goes through at that time.” Read more...

The Best Russian Novels

Orlando Figes, Historian

“I chose this because most of us have read War and Peace, but many of us are less familiar with Tolstoy’s later life when he stressed his pacifist convictions in the most absolute of terms. There is a tendency to regard this as a personal development of Tolstoy’s which was almost out of keeping with what came before. But if you go back to his early experiences in the Caucasus and the Crimea as a young man in the 1840s, when he began to write about war – he reported from Sevastopol during the Crimean war – you already find in him a spirit of questioning the meaning of war, and why people are prepared to kill each other, which he continues to explore in War and Peace and which leads him eventually to his pacifist position.” Read more...

The best books on Peace

John Gittings, Journalist

“The main character in What Men Live By is an angel punished by God for refusing to take a woman’s life. The story is charming, the moral worn lightly.” Read more...

The Best Russian Short Stories

Rosamund Bartlett, Translator

“It’s possibly the best short story ever written, depending on whether or not you consider The Leopard (Giuseppe di Lampedusa) to be a short story, but it is only about 50 pages or so. It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates.” Read more...

The best books on Why We Live in a Mad World

Oliver James, Psychologist

“Although he set out to write a moralising novel showing the evils of Anna’s adultery, his human empathy pushed him in a very different direction, and the reader sees every step towards the final tragedy from Anna’s point of view and sees how difficult—perhaps impossible—any of the alternatives would have been.” Read more...

The best books on Moral Philosophy

Jonathan Glover, Philosopher

“Tolstoy’s book is about a Shamil lieutenant, Hadji Murad, who goes over to the Russians, then tries to go back. What I like about it is that it shows war as profoundly ignoble – as an awful combination of personal circumstances that end in disaster for everyone. Hadji Murad, it turns out, was forced by tribal politics to join Shamil and become his star fighter; he turns to the Russians because he’s forced by more murderous tribal politics. He fears for his family and he tries to go back, with disastrous consequences, because rivalries among the Russian generals mean he doesn’t get the honourable deal from them that he’s been promised. Tolstoy is fearless in showing everyone in the theatre of war trapped between two tyrannies, the Russian tyranny a terrifying imposition, but the demands of the mountain armies no less tyrannical. The book also has a powerful and much-quoted description of how Chechen villagers feel when their homes are burned to the ground by Russian troops. “No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings … the desire to exterminate them – like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves – was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.”” Read more...

The best books on Chechnya

Vanora Bennett, Historical Novelist