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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s not every day that you bump into a Tolstoy in India. At this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival, as I wait to check into the hotel, a stranger greets me with a warm smile. “Hi, I am Daniil Tolstoy ...

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 ...