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Literary imagination has always challenged philosophy, as it has in the modern age, with its philosophies utopianism and disenchantment. The contest between two has been raging in Russia for some two hundred years, often taking the form of an antagonism between modernity and tradition, and it cuts through the heart of Tolstoy's fiction Tolstoy's fiction grew originally out of his diaries, in which he tried to understand his own feelings and actions so as to control them. Tolstoy's major work, War and Peace, appeared between the years 1865 and 1869. The epic tale depicted the story of five families against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Tolstoy's other masterpiece, Anna Karenina (1873-77), told a tragic story of a married woman, who follows her lover, but finally commits suicide. Tolstoy juxtaposed in the work crises of family life with the quest for the meaning of life.

Of Tolstoy's two epic novels, the War and Peace has always been more popular than Anna Karenina, perhaps because it includes features of mythology that are accessible to readers. Though this story primarily deals with the interactions between various members of the Russian aristocracy before and during the war, the novel is interspersed with evenly spaced historical analysis by Tolstoy concerning such things as causes of war, sources of secular power, motivations for specific actions or instances of inaction during the French-Russian conflict, and explanations of societal phenomenon expressed vis-à-vis the mob.

Its subject (to use Bezukhov’s categories) is "life-as-spectacle," for readers, diverted by their various incidents, observe its hero In this sprawling epic narrative Tolstoy manages to accurately describe the trials and tribulations of life, brilliantly deconstruct the mythic figure of Napoleon, and attempt to explain the meaning of existence.

Napoleon primarily from without. The tragic Anna Karenina, however, presents “life-as-experience”: readers are asked to identify with the mind of Oblonsky, whose motivations render him not particularly likable hero. Death is an integral part of everybody's life and no matter who it is, everybody fears death. To come to terms with death is something that takes a lot of courage and a full understanding of oneself. Tolstoy in his novel, has revealed to us the effect that death can have on a person and advocates us to not succumb to the daily life of the world which we live in, because it is all a delusion. Yet if we live as naturally as possible, we can get a better grasp on the true essence of life as Levin does in the novel. He finds joy out of working and enjoying the fruits of his labor, instead of indulging himself in the materialism of the hypocritical aristocrats.

In addition, Anna Karenina more than the War and Peace, suggests the complexity of the gods’ involvement in human actions, and to the extent that modern readers find this complexity a needless complication, the Anna Karenina is satisfying than the War and Peace, with its simpler scheme of divine justice. Finally, since the Anna Karenina presents a historically verifiable action – Leningrad siege, the novel raises historical questions that are absent from the War and Peace's blithely imaginative world.

Leo Tolstoy writes from the perspective of a country in turmoil and how his social commentary is then closely intertwined with the more general search for personal fulfillment. The result is the timeless quality of the works that are still enjoyed by a wide readership today. It explores how it is this timeless quality of his work, based upon his search for meaning in life, that most prominently begs for Tolstoy's inclusion in today's literary canon.