Russian · 1828–1910
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) wrote two novels widely considered among the greatest in any language — War and Peace and Anna Karenina — and dozens of shorter works that demonstrate the same compassionate observation at smaller scale. A Russian count who later renounced his wealth and became a moral philosopher, Tolstoy wrote fiction that never loses sight of the fact that real people contain multitudes. Three of his works are available to speed-read in warpread.app, including the harrowing short novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which many readers find more powerful per page than anything in his longer novels.
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A successful magistrate falls ill and slowly realises, during the months of his dying, that he has spent his entire life performing the correct social role rather than living. Tolstoy's short masterpiece on the relationship between how we live and how we die — more devastating per page than anything in his longer novels.
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