Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910): Art and truth
Journal: Cambridge University Press eBooks
Year: 2012

Leo Tolstoy, who wrote three novels, insisted that the first and most ambitious of them – War and Peace (WP) – was not a novel at all: he called it a ‘book’ instead. The second – Anna Karenina (AK) – he subtitled ‘a novel’. The fact that roman, the Russian word for ‘novel’, also means ‘love affair’ ties the genre more closely to romantic love than in English. The ‘novel’ in the title of Anna Karenina is associated specifically with Anna's story, and the continuation of the book after her death a