Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), was a Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist fiction. Anna Karenina tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner, who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.