Tolstoys Reading List: Essential Books for Each Stage of LifebyMaria PopovaEven if one could never finish great literature, one has to begin somewhere.Shortly after his fiftieth birthday,Leo Tolstoysuccumbed to a deep spiritual crisis and decided to pull himself out byfinding the meaning of life. He did so largely by reading voraciously across the worlds major philosophical and religious traditions, discovering great similarities in how they dealt withthe truth of the human spirit. He was also, as any great writer, an insatiable reader of literature, which he wove together intoA Calendar of Wisdom the proto-Tumblr he spent the final decades of his life assembling.But despite his wide and prolific reading, Tolstoy did consider specific books especially important and influential in his development. At the age of sixty-three, in a letter to a friend, he compiled such a list of the books that had most impressed him over the course of his life. Dated October 25, 1891, and found inTolstoys Letters(public library), the missive is prefaced by the authors disclaimer:I am sending the list I began, but didnt finish, for your consideration, but not for publication, since it is still far from complete.(Reading, of course, is inherently incompletable one can never hope to finish the body of literature, nor should one wish to.)

Under the headingWORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION,Tolstoy divides his reading list into five distinct life-stages beginning with childhood and ending with his age at the time and ranks each title by excellence, from great to v. great to enormous. Curiously, Tolstoy seems to consider the teenage years ones most formative, prescribing for them books greater in both quality and quantity, whereas the twenties and early thirties are most meager in both and mostly occupied by poetry perhaps because few people at the time had the luxury of leisure for reading during their most vital wage-earning years, or maybe because Tolstoy simply believed that one should be busier living than reading during that life-stage.That only two known women figure in Tolstoys list is, one would imagine, less a function of his bias than of his eras and his cultures though the latter certainly shape the former.CHILDHOOD TO AGE 14 OR SOGreat: Tales from The Thousand and One Nights(public library): The 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman Pushkins Poems(public library): NapoleonV. great: The Little Black Hen(public library) by PogorelskyEnormous: The story of Joseph fromThe Bible(public library) The Byliny(public library) folk tales: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha PopovichAGE 14 TO 20Great: The Conquest of Mexico(public library) by William Prescott Tales of Good and Evil(public library) by Nikolai Gogol: Overcoat, The Two Ivans, Nevsky ProspectV. great: A Sentimental Journey(public library) by Laurence Sterne A Hero for Our Time(public library) by Mikhail Lermontov The Hapless Antonby Dmitry Grigorovich Polinka Saks(public library) by Aleksandr Druzhinin A Sportsmans Notebook(public library) by Ivan Turgenev Dead Souls(public library) by Nikolai Gogol Die Ruber(public library) by Friedrich Schiller Yevgeny Onegin(public library) by Alexander Pushkin Julie, or the New Heloise(public library) by Jean-Jacques RousseauEnormous: The Gospel of Matthew(public library): Sermon on the Mount The Confessions(public library) by Jean Jacques-Rousseau Emile: Or on Education(public library) by Jean Jacques-Rousseau Viy fromThe Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol(public library) David Copperfield(public library) by Charles DickensAGE 20 TO 35Great: Poems(public library) by F.T. Tyutchev Poems(public library) by Koltsov The Iliad / The Odyssey(public library) by Homer* Poems(public library) by Afanasy Fet The Symposium and The Phaedo(public library) by PlatoV. great: Hermann and Dorothea(public library) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Notre-Dame de Paris(public library) by Victor HugoAGE 35 TO 50Great: Thenovelsof Mrs. Henry Wood Thenovelsof George Eliot Thenovelsof Anthony TrollopeV. great: The Iliad / The Odyssey(public library) by Homer* The Byliny(public library) Xenophons Anabasis(public library)Enormous: Les Misrables(public library) by Victor Hugo