Anna Karenina

The novel is set 60 years before Tolstoy's day, but he had spoken with people who lived through the 1812 French invasion of Russia. He read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and had read letters, journals, autobiographies and biographies of Napoleon and other key players of that era. There are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace.He worked from primary source materials (interviews and other documents), as well as from history books, philosophy texts and other historical novels. Tolstoy also used a great deal of his own experience in the Crimean War to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the Russian army was structured.Tolstoy was critical of standard history, especially military history, in War and Peace. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume ii.

An Kareni is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Many writers consider An Kareni the greatest work of literature ever. An Kareni is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. An Kareni has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but feels that her life is empty until she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. The plot centers on an extramarital affair between An and Vronsky. A complex novel in eight parts, with more than a dozen major characters. It deals with themes of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, Imperial Russian society, desire, and rural vs. city life. The novel explores a diverse range of topics throughout its approximately one thousand pages. Some of these topics include an evaluation of the feudal system that existed in Russia at the time-politics, not only in the Russian government but also at the level of the individual characters and families, religion, morality, gender and social class.