In Russian, OK - but "authentic"? How do we know? Basically, Tolstoy wrote in old Cyrillic from before the orthographic "reform" of the October 10, 1918. Tolstoy died in 1910.

So is it "authentic" the way Tolstoy wrote it, or is it in the new Cyrillic? Btw., not even all Russian literature written after 1918 was in the new orthography - for example, many emigre Russian writers in the 20's and 30's wrote in the old Cyrillic.

Let us therefore not make crazy claims about "authentic", if they are not "authentic". Many Russians today don't know how to write in the old Cyrillic either, so maybe they can't tell what is "authentic".

Again - how "authentic" are these volumes?

Oh, OK. Fine. I take it back. I was just angry because Tolstoy worked very hard to write the most beautiful literature. Did you know that he picked words to also look beautiful in a sentence, not just sound nice, or meaning, but also appearance, how they looked visually on a page in a sentence? So when you change the orthography, you change the look of those words and that part of his work is lost. It is the same in poetry, it makes a difference not just to meaning but how the words look on a page. The other thing is why those reforms were made in 1917-18 - it was only for one reason: because there were a lot of illiterate people, and they were trying to teach them reading/writing as fast as possible, so they wanted the simplest possible spelling. That was the reason - not to improve the appearance or other values of the spelling, but to make it easier to learn. If Tolstoy knew what they did to his writing, he would have had a stroke from anger. It is wrong to do such a terrible thing - think about it, we read Shakespeare in the original language, not modern words. Today, I am very sad that the beautiful work of Tolstoy maybe has not been properly respected.

OK, I don't like to make any flame wars or to quarrel online, so I will only answer this, then stop. I am not making it up at all and I am very serious in research. I just checked to see if I remembered correctly why the reform was made. I was right. Here is the evidence, and by the way, it even mentions Tolstoy:

http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/culture/orthography.shtml

"The orthographic reform was intended to facilitate rapid and widespread acquisition of literacy among Russian speakers, both native speakers of Russian and speakers of Russian as a second-language, state subjects of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks’ challenge was to inculcate socialist ideology to a population that was highly stratified with a relatively small literate elite and a vast underclass of peasants and workers with little to no literacy. These, moreover, spoke varieties of Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian that were linguistically distinct from the literary language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky."

So yes, the #1 reason was to make it easy to achieve literacy for the masses (plus a little ideology). Also, I never blamed the Soviets or said it was ONLY the Soviets who had this idea - no, it was an old idea:

"The process pitted traditionalists, who supported Ia. K. Grot’s (1812–1893) orthography against reformists, who saw the archaisms of the old orthography as a drag on literacy and learning."

That was an idea to make it easier for learning and literacy - this means teaching people who were illiterate. And that started long ago:

"Although the reform of the orthography would be criticized on ideological grounds by émigré groups and, after the collapse of the USSR in Russia proper, as a perversion of historical tradition committed by the Bolsheviks, the general outlines of the reform were already widely agreed upon in the nineteenth century. The last phase of attempts to reform the orthography began in earnest in 1862, in the period of Alexander II's Great Reforms."

So as you can see, I am not making it up. The #1 reason for that reform was to make it easier to teach people to read and write, to bring literacy to the masses. I hope you don't think I am simplifying the issue, because that was not my intention. I only want to see the works of Tolstoy preserved in ORIGINAL, as HE wanted and as HE wrote. Thank you, and have a beautiful weekend.