Tales of Sexual Desire: Father Sergius, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil

by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy wrote some of the most disquieting short stories the world has known. These three are no exception. Here, the duels and duality of man and woman are played out in tortured - and sometimes tragic - drama. Above all, the characters featured in these pages bring to life universal truths for the human condition; truths that Tolstoy weaves with an almost unrivalled skill.

208 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2005

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to like anything Tolstoy writes, but these stories were no where near his best work. Kreutzer Sonata was interesting, and again showed Tolstoy's jaded view of the relationship between man and woman. But overall, meh.