The Russian novelist and moral philosopher Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) ranks as one of the world’s great writers, and his “War and Peace” has been called the greatest novel ever written.

Although he was born into nobility, Tolstoy spent much of his life as a champion of Russia’s peasant class, notably in the field of education.

He began his literary career in the 1850s, publishing a trilogy about his own life: Childhood (Detstvo, 1852), Boyhood (Otrochestvo, 1854) and Youth (Yunost’, 1857).

Few in our modern world are those, who never heard of Germany’s greatest man of letters, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, nor his magnum opus, Faust, an insurmountable peak of world literature. Fewer, however, are those, who ever heard that the 23 year old Goethe wrote a poem in praise of the Prophet of Islam, nor that the 70 year old Goethe celebrated the night in which the Quran was revealed. Between the two landmarks in […]

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is considered one of the German language’s greatest poets. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and profound anxiety – themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditions and the modernist posts.