Sevastopol Tales

His fiction changed the way human beings think about themselves * George Saunders *
He simply presented the world, and the world, looked at closely, is often extraordinary * Yiyun Li *
What Tolstoy achieves-and what any fiction writer hopes to achieve-is, in fact, magic * Claire Messud *
All of Tolstoy’s writing, fictional and non-fictional, is concerned with truth * J.M. Coetzee *
If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy * Isaac Babel *
The greatest of all novelists * Virginia Woolf *
Tolstoy serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature * Anton Chekhov *
He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical * James Joyce *
The greatest Russian writer of prose fiction * Vladimir Nabokov *
The greatest novelist who ever lived – Philip Hensher * Guardian *
His imagination was never daunted * A.S. Byatt *
Tolstoy’s historical and human sweep is breathtaking * Jonathan Dimbleby *
Tolstoy is the towering genius of the novel * Howard Jacobson *

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into the Russian aristocracy, spent his youth in aimless dissolution, and joined the army in a bid to escape his gambling debts. Sevastopol Tales, based on his experience serving as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, helped to establish his fame as a writer in the 1850s. The war helped transform him into a passionate pacifist and social agitator. He started a series of schools for the recently emancipated serfs of Russia, as well as publishing a number of literary masterpieces, most famously the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He gradually became a near-messianic figure, both lauded and persecuted by the Russian authorities. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prizes in Literature and Peace, but never won.

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