Leo Tolstoy Books in Order: A Reading Order and Translation Guide
Tolstoy Books in Order: The Short Answer
Leo Tolstoy's major fiction and non-fiction, in order of original Russian publication:
- Childhood (1852)
- Boyhood (1854)
- Sevastopol Sketches (1855–56)
- Youth (1857)
- Family Happiness (1859)
- The Cossacks (1863)
- War and Peace (1865–69)
- Anna Karenina (1875–77)
- A Confession (1882)
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
- How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1886)
- The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
- The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894)
- Master and Man (1895)
- What Is Art? (1897)
- Resurrection (1899)
- Father Sergius (published 1911)
- The Devil (published 1911)
- Hadji Murad (published 1912)
The last three were written in Tolstoy's later years but held back from publication and printed after his death in 1910.
Publication order is not reading order, though. Almost nobody should start at the top of that list.
Where to Start
Tolstoy wrote two enormous novels and a shelf of short, sharp fiction. The short fiction is where most readers should begin, because it gives you his voice in ninety pages instead of nine hundred.
A suggested sequence
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich — a short novel about a magistrate who realises his life has been a performance. The best single introduction to Tolstoy.
- Master and Man — a landowner and his servant caught in a blizzard. Very short, and it tells you what Tolstoy thought mattered.
- Anna Karenina — his most approachable long novel.
- War and Peace — the big one, and easier than its reputation.
- The Cossacks or Hadji Murad — the Caucasus books, both excellent and both overlooked.
- Resurrection — the last novel, and the most openly political.
The two great novels
If you only ever read two Tolstoy books, read Anna Karenina and War and Peace.
Anna Karenina is the better starting point of the pair. It has a tighter plot, a smaller cast, and two storylines that alternate cleanly — Anna's affair and Levin's life on the land. Readers who expect a tragic romance are often surprised to find that half the book is about farming, faith and marriage.
War and Peace is longer but not harder. It follows a handful of families through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and the difficulty is bookkeeping rather than prose: there are hundreds of named characters, most Russians have three or four forms of their name, and the narrative stops periodically for essays on history. Any edition with a character list and a family tree solves most of this.
If you bounce off him
Two things put readers off, and both have workarounds.
The first is the War and Peace epilogue. The novel effectively ends, then continues into a long historical argument about free will and the causes of events. Skipping the second epilogue costs you nothing narratively.
The second is the late religious writing. A Confession, The Kingdom of God Is Within You and What Is Art? are the work of a man who had renounced his own novels, and they are argument rather than story. They are worth reading eventually, but starting there will give you a false idea of what his fiction is like.
Same Book, Different Spine
Tolstoy's titles are more stable than Dostoevsky's, but a few variants catch people out in second-hand shops.
- Anna Karenina appears on some older Penguin editions as Anna Karenin, without the final "a". Same novel — the translator dropped the feminine ending that Russian surnames take.
- Sevastopol Sketches is also sold as Sebastopol Sketches and The Sevastopol Stories.
- A Confession turns up as Confession and as My Confession.
- Childhood, Boyhood and Youth are three separate works, almost always sold bound together as Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Buying that one volume gets you all three.
- Family Happiness is sometimes Family Happiness and sometimes Happy Ever After.
Short fiction is rarely sold alone. The Death of Ivan Ilyich normally arrives in a collection alongside Master and Man, The Kreutzer Sonata and a handful of the folk tales, which is the efficient way to buy it.
The Translation Question
This matters more with Tolstoy than with most authors, because two of his translations are over a century old, out of copyright, and therefore what you get by default when you buy cheaply.
Why the cheap ones are all Garnett or Maude
Constance Garnett translated Tolstoy in the early 1900s, and Louise and Aylmer Maude translated him at roughly the same time — the Maudes knew Tolstoy personally and worked with his approval, which is why their versions carry a certain authority. Both are long out of copyright, so unattributed bargain paperbacks and free ebook editions are almost always one or the other.
Neither is bad. Garnett is smooth and slightly Victorian, and she quietly tidies things Tolstoy left rough. The Maude translations are more literal and better on the military and agricultural detail. If a used copy does not name a translator anywhere, it is very likely Garnett.
The modern translators
- Rosemary Edmonds translated both big novels for Penguin in the 1950s. Readable, widely available second-hand, and the source of the Anna Karenin title.
- Anthony Briggs did War and Peace for Penguin in 2005. The most conversational of the modern versions, and he renders the French into English.
- Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky did Anna Karenina (2000) and War and Peace (2007). They stay closest to Tolstoy's sentence rhythms and keep his repetitions rather than smoothing them out. Their War and Peace leaves the French in the text with translations in footnotes.
- Rosamund Bartlett and Marian Schwartz both published Anna Karenina translations in 2014, for Oxford and Yale respectively. Bartlett's is the more fluent, Schwartz's the more deliberately rough-edged.
- Amy Mandelker revised the Maude Anna Karenina for Oxford World's Classics, which is a good compromise: the Maude fidelity with the archaisms cleaned up.
The French problem
War and Peace opens with its Russian aristocrats speaking French, and Tolstoy meant that to be jarring. Translators handle it three ways: render it all into English, leave the French with footnotes, or leave it with no help at all. If you do not read French, check this before buying — an edition that leaves long French passages unglossed is genuinely hard going in the first hundred pages.
If you just want an answer
For Anna Karenina, the Maude translation as revised by Mandelker. For War and Peace, Briggs if you want to be carried along, Pevear and Volokhonsky if you want to feel the Russian underneath. For the short fiction, any of them; the prose is plainer and the differences matter less.
The Shorter Fiction
Tolstoy's short work is where he is at his most direct, and it is badly underread.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) — about ninety pages, and the most quietly devastating thing he wrote.
- Master and Man (1895) — a blizzard, a merchant, a peasant. Perhaps thirty pages.
- How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1886) — a parable about greed, short enough to read aloud in one sitting.
- The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) — a man explains why he killed his wife. Disturbing, and deliberately so.
- Hadji Murad (1912) — a Chechen commander caught between sides. Tolstoy's last sustained piece of fiction and arguably his most purely enjoyable.
- The Cossacks (1863) — a young officer in the Caucasus, drawn from Tolstoy's own army service.
- Father Sergius (1911) — a monk's vanity, told in eighty pages.
How Long, and How Hard
Rough page counts, which vary by edition and translation:
- War and Peace — around 1,200 pages. The longest commonly read novel in the Western canon.
- Anna Karenina — around 850 pages.
- Resurrection — around 500 pages.
- The Cossacks — around 200 pages.
- Hadji Murad — around 130 pages.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich — around 90 pages.
- Master and Man — around 30 pages.
On difficulty: Tolstoy is one of the easier great novelists to read sentence by sentence. He does not write in riddles and he rarely makes you work out what is happening. The demands he makes are length and patience, not obscurity. Readers who find Dostoevsky feverish usually find Tolstoy calm.
The Life That Produced the Books
Tolstoy was born in 1828 to an aristocratic family at Yasnaya Polyana, the estate south of Moscow where he spent most of his life and where he is buried. He was orphaned young, left university without a degree, ran up gambling debts, and joined the army — serving at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, which produced the sketches that first made his name.
He married Sofia Behrs in 1862 and wrote both his great novels in the two decades that followed, with Sofia copying out drafts of War and Peace by hand. Then, around 1880, he underwent a religious crisis that turned him against the Orthodox Church, against private property, and against his own fiction, which he came to regard as self-indulgent. He spent his last thirty years writing moral philosophy, arguing with his wife about the estate, and being visited by admirers from around the world. His doctrine of non-violent resistance reached Gandhi, who corresponded with him.
He died in 1910 at a railway station at Astapovo, aged 82, having left home in the middle of winter to get away from his family.
Finding Used Copies
Tolstoy is one of the easiest authors to build second-hand, because he has been in print continuously for over a century and the big novels were bought by far more people than finished them. Expect a good supply of barely-read copies.
Two practical points. First, check the translator on the copyright page before buying the big novels — it is the single thing that most affects your experience, and unattributed editions are usually the century-old ones. Second, buy the short fiction as a collection rather than hunting individual titles.
Frequently Asked Questions
What order should I read Tolstoy in?
Not publication order. Start with The Death of Ivan Ilyich, then Master and Man, then Anna Karenina, then War and Peace. The short fiction gives you his voice quickly and tells you whether you want to commit to a thousand pages.
Which Tolstoy book should I read first?
The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It is about ninety pages, it needs no background, and it contains everything Tolstoy cared about. If you want to start with a full-length novel, start with Anna Karenina rather than War and Peace.
Is Anna Karenin the same book as Anna Karenina?
Yes. Rosemary Edmonds titled her Penguin translation Anna Karenin, dropping the feminine ending Russian surnames take for women. It is the same novel.
Which translation of War and Peace is best?
There is no single answer, but two good defaults: Anthony Briggs for readability, or Pevear and Volokhonsky for closeness to the Russian. The Maude translation is also excellent and was made with Tolstoy's own approval. Check how your edition handles the French passages before buying.
Why do cheap Tolstoy editions not name a translator?
Because they are reprinting a translation old enough to be out of copyright — almost always Constance Garnett or the Maudes, from the early 1900s. Neither is a bad translation, but a publisher who does not name the translator is telling you something about how much care went into the edition.
Do I need to read the War and Peace epilogues?
The first epilogue finishes the characters' stories and is worth reading. The second is a historical essay on free will and causation with no narrative content, and skipping it costs you nothing as a reader.
What is the shortest Tolstoy book?
Among the well-known works, Master and Man at roughly thirty pages, or How Much Land Does a Man Need?, which is shorter still. Both are complete, serious Tolstoy rather than fragments.
Is War and Peace actually hard to read?
Less than its reputation suggests. The prose is clear and the scenes are vivid. The real obstacles are its length, the size of the cast, and the Russian naming conventions — all of which an edition with a character list largely solves.
Which Tolstoy books are suitable for teenagers?
How Much Land Does a Man Need? and the folk tales work well for younger readers. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murad suit older teenagers. The Kreutzer Sonata deals with sexual jealousy and a killing, and is better left until later.
Have a look through our classics collection for used editions of the books on this list.
