Leo Tolstoy Google Logo Brings To Life The Author’s Classic Novels

Today’s Google logo is an homage to Leo Tolstoy to mark the Russian author’s 186th birthday.

The animated logo brings to life scenes from Tolstoy’s classic novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, along with stills of Tolstoy at his writing desk and standing among the trees at his family’s estate Yasnaya Polyana where he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Led by guest Doodler Roman Muradov, the Google Doodle team selected two key passages from each of the novels to assemble the logo. Muradov, who illustrated a recent release of James Joyce’s Dubliners for Penguin Classics, noted how he used Tolstoy’s writing style to create the logo images.

[blockquote = city”Roman Muradov, Guest Doodler”]It seemed fitting to focus on Tolstoy’s central theme of dualism and to highlight his stylistic nuances through the rhythm of the sequences – the almost full moon against the almost starless night, the red of Anna’s handbag, Ivan’s fatal curtains that stand between him and the light of his spiritual awakening.[/blockquote]

Born Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy on this day in 1828, Tolstoy’s work inspired a number of films and remains a mainstay in high school and college literature class rooms around the world.

The Tolstoy logo comes complete with sharing features to post it on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, along with an email link.

You can watch the logo in its entirety via this video by WebSonic:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/hYMluFfEYqw[/youtube]