Leo Tolstoy thinks that Anna Karenina was…
1887 CE
Leo Tolstoy thinks that Anna Karenina was his first true novel.
In 1879-80, when he is in his early fifties, he writes A Confession, a short work (confession) on the subject of melancholia, philosophy and religion.
After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy has concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and What Is to Be Done? develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy.
Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.
Tolstoy not only draws from his own life experiences but also creates characters in his own image, such as Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei in War and Peace, Levin in Anna Karenina and to some extent, Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection.
War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its dramatic breadth and unity.
Its vast canvas includes five hundred and eighty characters, many historical with others fictional.
The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino.
Tolstoy's original idea for the novel was to investigate the causes of the Decembrist revolt, to which it refers only in the last chapters, from which can be deduced that Andrei Bolkonski's son will become one of the Decembrists.
The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander.
Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy does not consider War and Peace to be a novel (nor does he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at this time to be novels).
This view becomes less surprising if one considers that Tolstoy is a novelist of the realist school who considers the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life.
War and Peace (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore does not qualify.