Maria Leśniewska Ordre des livres (chronologique)

After marrying Count Leo Tolstoy, the renowned author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace , Sofia Tolstoy kept a detailed diary until his death in 1910. Her life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband but was tormented by him. She lived against the background of one of the most turbulent periods in her country’s history, as old feudal Russia was transformed by three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy’s own life story—the study of one woman’s private experience—that these diaries are most valuable and moving. They reveal a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and to remain indomitable.

'Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex' Guardian Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence. Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.

La Sonate à Kreutzer est une nouvelle de Léon Tolstoï, publiée en 1889. Elle raconte l'histoire de Pozdnychev, un homme qui, lors d'un voyage en train, partage ses réflexions sur l'amour et les relations, affirmant que l'amour n'est qu'une attirance physique. Il révèle finalement avoir tué sa femme.