Leo Tolstoy, who wrote three novels, insisted that the first and most ambitious of them – War and Peace (WP) – was not a novel at all: he called it a ‘book’ instead. The second – Anna Karenina (AK) – he subtitled ‘a novel’. The fact that roman, the Russian word for ‘novel’, also means ‘love affair’ ties the genre more closely to romantic love than in English. The ‘novel’ in the title of Anna Karenina is associated specifically with Anna's story, and the continuation of the book after her death asserts that novels end, while life – and Tolstoy's book – go on. In the 1890s, writing Resurrection (R), Tolstoy referred to it casually and multiple times as a novel, but he also remarked in his 1893 diary that ‘the novel form is on its way out’. Here and elsewhere during the 1890s, he complained that it was shameful to invent stories for the decadent leisured classes, and, as we shall see, he conceptualised Resurrection as a novel that reproaches its fellows. So, having hardly acknowledged the existence of the novel in his œuvre early on, Tolstoy was ready to usher it out in his old age. Nonetheless, in his own time and today he has been recognised as one of the world's greatest novelists.

We might attribute Tolstoy's resistance to the novel form to contrarianism; he loved to expose false pretences and undercut convention. Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky located his unique greatness in such truth seeking. One of the main purposes of art, according to Shklovsky, is to shake up automatic perceptions.