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“... Leo Tolstoy was not only a great writer but also a passionately outspoken public moralist in the Russian prophetic mode followed a century later by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A political presence because of his impact on public opinion, he steered clear of direct political involvement. He was above politics. ‘On the one hand,’ Lenin wrote of him in 1908, ‘we have a remarkably powerful, direct and sincere protest against social lies and falsehood, while on the other we have the Tolstoyan, i ...”

“... added to the list of great non-winners of this prize, a list headed by Henrik Ibsen (d.1906) and Leo Tolstoy (d. 1910). August Strindberg died on 14 May; he at least had had the consolation of a ‘People’s Nobel Prize’, awarded at the climax of a public parade through the streets of Stockholm a couple of years earlier. The fate of Benito Perez ...”

“... Tolstoy was much preoccupied with questions of identity. His brutally penetrating intelligence, as well as the instinctive self-confidence of an aristocrat, were always running incredulously up against the fact of existence, and the certainty of non-existence. What and who was he at different moments of the day? One of his earliest attempts at writing is a history of 24 hours, a record of his various selves during that period ...”

“... person’, is sumasshedshy, literally ‘who was going out of their mind’. Sofia Andreyevna Tolstoy, wife of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, did go out of her mind at the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana in 1910. She didn’t lose her mind. She went back to it later, and lived another nine years. But she did lose her ...”

“... If the world could write by itself,’ Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and country, high society and hunting, the salon and the racetrack, home and abroad, it would have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina ...”

“... more intriguing, because it took hold in the international sphere, the world of German sexology, Leo Tolstoy and P.D. Ouspenski. It is very odd that Tsuzuki says nothing of Carpenter’s influence in Japan, where some of his ideas on ‘comrade love’ and sacrificial struggle must have fitted neatly with a range of Japanese codes of conduct, many of ...”

“... called ‘Les Auteurs de ma vie’. Earlier titles included works by Stefan Zweig on Tolstoy, Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer, Paul Valéry on Descartes, and contributions from living writers such as Marie-Hélène Lafon (on Flaubert) and Michel Schneider (on Pascal). The series was started in 2016, and the most recent book in the set, before ...”

“... alluding to those moments when a writer appeals to something consensual that everyone knows. Tolstoy uses it with great simplicity and force. In The Death of Ivan Ilich, he describes a group of men who are discussing the recent news of Ivan’s death. Tolstoy remarks that ‘as is usual in such cases’, each man was ...”

“... Keith Talent went through his mid-life crisis at the age of 19, or read that ‘in common with Leo Tolstoy, Keith Talent thought of time as moving past him while he just stayed the same,’ the gap between the protagonist’s low-life awareness and the author’s cruelly superior understanding was the joke, the ironic motor for the fiction. But The ...”

“... in the Great Hall of the Assembly of Nobles at Sevastopol, where, the young artillery officer Leo Tolstoy recalled, you were ‘assailed without warning by the sight and smell of about 40 or 50 amputees … Now, if you have strong nerves, go through the doorway on the left: that is the room in which wounds are bandaged and operations ...”

“... On the whole, the evidence suggests that London did not kill himself, at least not directly. Tolstoy and London died within ten years of each other. But, with the wealth of primary materials openly available on Tolstoy, A.N. Wilson has written a biography of a kind that seems for ever denied London. Three factors have ...”

“... prizes – 139,000 roubles – to charity, without a thought that his children might need it, like Leo Tolstoy, who made over the royalties from his books to charity and left his family destitute. Perhaps all three men tried to make up for their failure to love those closest to them by trying to love all mankind. Even tragic history often has its ironic ...”

“... The sea does not laugh, the sea does not laugh, or cry – it roars, splashes, glitters. Look at Tolstoy: with him the sun rises, the sun sets ... his birds sing. No one cries. There’s no laughing or crying. The important thing is simplicity.’ Chekhov spoke with passion, while his long fingers toyed with the objects on the table in front of him – an ...”

“... the world of Marxist politics and made the most significant personal encounter of her life: with Leo Jogiches, a wealthy political exile from Lithuania. Leo became for her both ‘comrade’ and ‘lover’, providing tactical advice and financial support in the course of a seesaw relationship vividly recorded in Rosa’s ...”

“... essays in both the original and English translation, ‘the complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy’, Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Thackeray, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac and ‘any unflinching book on the World War’ – suggests that Salinger, whose forty-year silence followed its appearance, may have reached the same conclusion. But maybe ...”