Much of the writing even of such a great and world-famous figure as Tolstoy comes in the end to seem dead wood. His theories and polemics once impressed and influenced thousands, indeed millions, of readers, and sometimes changed their lives: but with time these writings necessarily have given up much of the life and force that was once in them. New generations have turned to new ideologies, and tried to find fresh spiritual solutions to life's problems.

But Tolstoy's art – the art that he himself came to reject or despise when he settled into the grip of his own later convictions – does not change; it remains as lively, as fascinating and as absorbing as ever. War and Peace and Anna Karenina will continue to delight their readers, and draw them irresistibly into a uniquely spacious and complex world, as long as there are any readers left at all. And these works will continue as well to exercise a profound influence on the best imaginative writing. In our own time Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy, as long as War and Peace and clearly inspired by it, has become – and deservedly – a world best-seller.

It is for this reason that I have concentrated in this short introduction to Tolstoy on his two greatest novels, and the ancillary texts and tales that relate to them. I make no apology for passing more rapidly over Tolstoy the prophet, preacher and reformer, because these sides of his work, while far from having become mere curiosities, can no longer speak to us with the power and originality of those masterpieces which we shall always continue to discover, discuss and explore.

What would Tolstoy feel about the ideological movements of our time, racial and ecological issues, feminism, political correctness? With much of what we now take for granted here he himself would probably have agreed; and yet there are few great writers who demonstrate such single-minded independence as Tolstoy did. Wholly ‘inner-directed’, as we should say today, he spent the first part of his life as a writer and thinker examining and analysing with a ruthless and penetrating intelligence every system and fashion of thought which his century produced in such abundance, and rejecting them all.