Leo Tolstoy

The BBC’s ecstatically reviewed new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s classic is coming to your TV screen—with an incestuous twist the writer may or may not have hinted at.

A new play featuring the third U.S. president, and the authors of “War and Peace” and “Tale of Two Cities” ruminates on what makes us human—our aspirations or our actions?

Passionate pairings, dysfunctional marriages, and jealous love triangles stoked many writers’ creative fires, producing the nine memorable works below. Joni Rendon and Shannon McKenna Schmidt are the authors of Writers Between the Covers: The Scandalous Romantic Lives of Legendary Literary Casanovas, Coquettes, and Cads.

If you had one year to live, how would you spend it? That’s a question most of us wouldn’t know how to answer but for one British publisher and translator it was easy: to translate Tolstoy’s great story about a dying man, “The Death of Ivan Illyich.”

It’s not hard to understand why Anthony Chiasson, already a millionaire, would risk it all to rake in even more. Libraries are filled with such tales—just ask Tolstoy, writes Liesl Schillinger.

As the Boston manhunt blared from TVs, critic Liesl Schillinger found herself turning to Tolstoy’s haunting final novel, Hadji Murat—and its thistle-sharp lessons on heroism and identity.

Benjamin Lytal checks in on Tolstoy’s tale of anti-heroism and betrayal, ‘Hadji Murad.’