Reading List

Authors Like Leo Tolstoy

In October 1910, at eighty-two, Tolstoy left his own house in the middle of the night to get away from his wife, his family and the life his fame had built around him. He took a train, caught pneumonia, and died ten days later in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, with journalists camped outside and his wife of forty-eight years not permitted into the room until he was unconscious. It is a very Tolstoyan ending: the man who wrote the two largest novels in the language spent his last decades trying to give everything away, including the copyrights. War and Peace (serialised 1865–67, published as a book in 1869) runs to over twelve hundred pages, follows several families through the Napoleonic invasion, and periodically stops the story to argue with historians about how history actually works. Anna Karenina (1875–77) runs two marriages against each other and opens with the most quoted first line in fiction. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) does the same work in ninety pages. He was excommunicated in 1901 and is still not on speaking terms with the Church. The ten below are chosen on scale, on ordinary life, and on who gets to tell it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Russian fiction · Two vast novels · Which translation to read · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

The permanent pairing is with Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the two never met. George Eliot is the English novelist working at the same depth, Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev are the Russians closest to him, and Vasily Grossman wrote the twentieth-century answer to War and Peace in a Soviet prison of a country. Two later novelists inherit the scale, one ancient poet is the comparison everyone reaches for, and his wife kept a diary.

Every book by Leo Tolstoy →

Where to start if you loved Leo Tolstoy

If you want the other great Russian, read Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Crime and Punishment. Fever where Tolstoy gives you daylight.

If you want the same depth in English, read George Eliot.

Middlemarch. A whole town, and nobody rescued by coincidence.

If you want the twentieth-century answer, read Vasily Grossman.

Life and Fate. The same structure, moved to Stalingrad and the camps.

If War and Peace is too long, read Ivan Turgenev.

Fathers and Sons. The same estates and arguments, in two hundred pages.

If you want the argument against him, read Sofia Tolstaya.

My Life. The same marriage, by the woman who copied the manuscripts.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

10 authors like Leo Tolstoy

01
The other one · Closest match

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Dostoevsky survived a staged execution in 1849, served four years at hard labour in Siberia, gambled away everything he earned, and wrote five novels about what people do once they have decided the rules do not apply to them. Crime and Punishment is a student who murders a pawnbroker to prove a theory; The Brothers Karamazov is a parricide and the most argued-over chapter in Russian literature. He died two months after finishing it.

The permanent comparison, made for a century and a half, and the two men never met. The usual formulation is that Tolstoy shows how people live and Dostoevsky shows what they believe at the end of themselves — daylight against fever. Tolstoy is the greater novelist by almost every technical measure; Dostoevsky asks the questions that keep you awake. Read Crime and Punishment and you will know which of the two you are.

— Lisanne
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Authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky →

02
The same depth, in English

George Eliot

British · The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871–72)

Middlemarch is three hundred thousand words about a provincial English town in 1832, in which a clever young woman marries a dry scholar believing she is joining a great work, and an idealistic doctor is worn down by small debts and smaller compromises. Mary Ann Evans published under a man's name, lived openly with a married man for twenty-four years, and translated German theology before she wrote a word of fiction.

The English novelist working at Tolstoy's depth on a smaller canvas, and the comparison is exact: both fill a large cast with ordinary people whose inner lives are rendered completely, both are interested in whether a decent life is possible inside a bad system, and both refuse to let a moral question resolve neatly. Eliot has no battlefields. She is the better psychologist of self-deception; he is the better dramatist.

— Lisanne
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03
The Russian who came after

Anton Chekhov

Russian · the short stories, Uncle Vanya (1898), The Cherry Orchard (1904)

Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout his writing life, wrote several hundred stories and four plays that remade the theatre, and travelled across Siberia in 1890 to survey the penal colony on Sakhalin himself. He knew Tolstoy, revered him, and disagreed with him in print about the late moral writing. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four.

The next generation, and the one who learned Tolstoy's attention to ordinary life while quietly dropping the sermon. A Chekhov story does in fifteen pages what The Death of Ivan Ilyich does in ninety: shows a person realising, too late, that their life has been a misunderstanding. He also refused to supply a conclusion, which is precisely what the late Tolstoy could not stop doing. Start with “The Lady with the Dog”.

— Lisanne
Every book by Anton Chekhov →
04
The contemporary he quarrelled with

Ivan Turgenev

Russian · Fathers and Sons (1862), A Sportsman's Sketches (1852)

Fathers and Sons introduced the word nihilist to a general readership through Bazarov, a young doctor who believes in nothing that cannot be dissected, and was attacked from both the left and the right on publication. A Sportsman's Sketches, a set of hunting stories that made serfdom visible to the Russian gentry, is said to have influenced the emancipation. Turgenev lived much of his life in France and quarrelled with Tolstoy for seventeen years, at one point nearly to a duel.

The third of the great Russian novelists, the most European of them and much the shortest. Turgenev writes the same estates, the same arguments between generations, the same summer afternoons, at a quarter of the length and with a lighter hand. If War and Peace is too much country house and you want the same world in two hundred pages, this is it.

— Lisanne
05
War and Peace, rewritten for Stalin's century

Vasily Grossman

Soviet · Life and Fate (written 1959), Stalingrad (1952)

Grossman reported the war for the Red Army newspaper, was at Stalingrad through the siege and among the first journalists into Treblinka, and then wrote a novel consciously modelled on War and Peace in which Nazism and Stalinism are shown to be the same machine. The KGB confiscated the manuscript in 1961 — including the typewriter ribbons — and told him it could not be published for two centuries. A hidden copy reached the West and it appeared in 1980, sixteen years after his death.

The most ambitious answer anyone has made to War and Peace, and it is explicit: the same structure of families and battlefields, the same digressions on history and freedom, moved to the twentieth century and its camps. Grossman has the harder material and Tolstoy the greater art. Read Life and Fate if you finished War and Peace wishing it went further.

— Lisanne
Every book by Vasily Grossman →
06
Older than the genre · The comparison everyone makes

Homer

Greek · the Iliad, the Odyssey

The Iliad covers a few weeks in the tenth year of the siege of Troy, and its subject is not the war but the rage of one man and what it costs everybody near him; the Odyssey is a soldier taking ten years to get home. Whether Homer was one person, several, or a tradition is unresolved and probably unresolvable. Emily Wilson's recent translations of both are the most readable in English.

Critics have reached for the epics to describe War and Peace since it appeared, and the comparison is not lazy. Both put enormous public violence next to small domestic moments and treat them as equally real; both refuse to make the enemy less human than the hero; both are interested in what a battlefield does to ordinary men rather than in tactics. Read the Iliad in Wilson's version and the resemblance is startling.

— Lisanne
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Authors like Homer →

07
The European family novel

Thomas Mann

German · Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924)

Buddenbrooks follows four generations of a merchant family in Lübeck as the business and the bloodline decline, published when Mann was twenty-six. The Magic Mountain puts a young engineer in an Alpine sanatorium for seven years while Europe argues itself toward 1914. He received the Nobel Prize in 1929 and left Germany in 1933, spending the war in California and broadcasting against the regime.

The German inheritance of what Tolstoy built: a family followed across decades, a whole society legible through one household, and long stretches of argument that a lesser novelist would cut. Mann is more ironic and more self-conscious; Tolstoy never winks. If the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys are why you read War and Peace, Buddenbrooks is the next book.

— Lisanne
Every book by Thomas Mann →
08
History at that scale, written now

Hilary Mantel

British · Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), The Mirror and the Light (2020)

The Cromwell trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell from a blacksmith's son to the most powerful man under Henry VIII and back to the scaffold, written in a close present tense that keeps the reader inside his head for seventeen hundred pages. The first two volumes each won the Booker Prize, which had never happened before. Mantel died in 2022, two years after finishing the trilogy.

The closest thing this century has produced to Tolstoy's combination of enormous historical machinery and complete interiority. Both write power as something exercised by specific tired people in specific rooms, and both are far more interested in the man calculating than in the battle. Mantel does not stop to lecture you about history; she dramatises the argument instead. Read Wolf Hall.

— Lisanne

Every book by Hilary Mantel →

09
Everything included

Karl Ove Knausgård

Norwegian · My Struggle, six volumes (2009–2011)

Knausgård wrote roughly thirty-six hundred pages about his own life, including several hundred on cleaning his dead father's house and a long stretch on a children's birthday party, and sold around half a million copies in a country of five million. Relatives disputed his account and threatened legal action before publication. He has since moved to fiction with the Morning Star sequence.

The modern writer who shares Tolstoy's strangest quality: the conviction that an ordinary hour deserves the same attention as a battle, and the nerve to spend forty pages on it. Tolstoy gives a whole chapter to a hunt and another to a name-day dinner because that is where a life actually happens. Knausgård does the same with a kitchen. He lacks the plot and the moral argument, which is either the loss or the point.

— Lisanne

Every book by Karl Ove Knausgård →

10
The argument against him

Sofia Tolstaya

Russian · My Life (written 1904–1916), the diaries

Tolstaya married at eighteen, bore thirteen children, ran the estate and the family finances, handled the publishing and the correspondence, and copied out War and Peace by hand repeatedly from her husband's corrections. She also kept diaries for nearly fifty years and wrote a long memoir, both published in full only recently, recording the same marriage from inside — including the late years when he preached poverty and celibacy while she held the household together.

The necessary correction to the saint. The late Tolstoy renounced property, sex and his own copyrights and became a moral authority to the world; his wife was the person who paid for that in daily labour and public humiliation, and she wrote it down. Her account is partial, furious and indispensable. Read it and Anna Karenina looks different, because the man who wrote so well about what a marriage does to a woman was conducting one of his own.

— Lisanne

Frequently asked questions about authors like Leo Tolstoy

Who should I read if I love Tolstoy?

Fyodor Dostoevsky is the permanent pairing and George Eliot the English novelist at the same depth. Anton Chekhov learned Tolstoy's attention to ordinary life and dropped the sermon, and Ivan Turgenev is the same world at a quarter of the length. Vasily Grossman wrote the twentieth-century War and Peace deliberately. Homer is the comparison critics have made since 1869, Thomas Mann is the German inheritance and Hilary Mantel the closest this century. Karl Ove Knausgård shares the nerve to spend forty pages on an ordinary hour. Sofia Tolstaya is the argument against.

Which Tolstoy should I start with?

Not War and Peace. Start with The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), which is about ninety pages, follows a judge who realises on his deathbed that his entire respectable life was a mistake, and contains everything Tolstoy does. Then Anna Karenina (1877), which has a plot that pulls you through eight hundred pages without effort. Then War and Peace, once you trust him. A Confession is the short account of the crisis that changed his life.

Which translation of War and Peace should I read?

Four are in circulation. Louise and Aylmer Maude knew Tolstoy personally and he approved their work, which makes theirs the closest to authorised; it is in Oxford World's Classics. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's is the bestselling modern version and keeps the French passages and the strangeness of the Russian, which some readers love and others find stiff. Anthony Briggs is the most fluent in British English. Rosemary Edmonds is smooth and now out of print. For Anna Karenina, a new translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater appeared from the Folio Society in January 2026 in a limited edition that sold out.

Is War and Peace actually worth it?

Yes, and it helps to know what you are in for. It runs to over twelve hundred pages, it is not one story but several families across fifteen years, and Tolstoy periodically stops the novel entirely to argue with historians about whether great men make history — the second epilogue is almost pure essay. Most readers find the novel itself far easier than its reputation and the historical digressions much harder. Skipping them on a first read is a defensible choice and nobody will know.

Why was Tolstoy excommunicated?

Because he rejected the Church directly. After the crisis he describes in A Confession, he arrived at his own reading of the Gospels centred on the Sermon on the Mount, rejecting the sacraments, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, private property, the state and the army. The Holy Synod excommunicated him in 1901. He spent his last decades as a Christian anarchist and pacifist whose writing on non-violence directly influenced Gandhi, with whom he corresponded.

What happened at the end of his life?

In October 1910 he left Yasnaya Polyana in the night at eighty-two, with his doctor and his daughter, to escape a marriage and a household that had become unbearable to him. He caught pneumonia within days and died on 7 November in the stationmaster's house at Astapovo. The world's press gathered outside. His wife Sofia, who had been married to him for forty-eight years, was kept from his room until he was no longer conscious. It was reported as a news event across Europe, which was itself part of what he was fleeing.

What is the criticism of Tolstoy?

Two things, both real. The philosophy-of-history material in War and Peace is repetitive and many readers find it dead weight; Tolstoy insisted it was the point of the book. And the late moralism — the tracts, the renunciation, the condemnation of art including his own novels — strikes a lot of readers as the work of a man being cruel to his family in the name of the good. Sofia Tolstaya's diaries are the primary document on the second charge, and they are not a comfortable read.

What order should I read his work in?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, then Anna Karenina, then War and Peace, then A Confession. If you want more after that, Hadji Murat — a short late novel about a Chechen commander that Harold Bloom called the best story in the world — and the Sevastopol Sketches, written when Tolstoy was an artillery officer in the Crimean War at twenty-six and already better than most people ever get.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878.

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