Collected Shorter Fiction

Collected Shorter Fiction #1-2

by Leo Tolstoy, Aylmer Maude (Translator), Louise Maude (Translator)

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life. Volume 2 reveals how these spiritual intimations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces which equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power. Readers of The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, Master and Man and Hadji Murad will recognize the brilliant younger novelist, now transfigured by his passionate quest for salvation and forgiveness.

Genres: Russia, Fiction, Classics

1856 pages, Hardcover

Published June 21, 2001

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.

See also:
French → Léon Tolstoï
Spanish → León Tolstói

Reviews

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

*The raid (1852) --
Wood-felling (1855) --
*Sevastopol in December 1854 (1855) --
*Sevastopol in May 1855 (1855) --
*Sevastopol in August 1855 (1856) --
The billiard-marker's notes (1855) --
*The snow storm (1856) --
*Two hussars (1856) --
The landlord's morning (1856) --
Meeting a Moscow acquaintance in the detachment (1856) --
Lucerne (1857) --
*Albert (1858) --
*Family happiness (1859) --
*Three deaths (1859) --
*Strider: the story of a horse (1861-86) --
Porcelain doll (1863) --1
Polikúshka (1863) --
God sees the truth, but waits (aka The long exile)--2
Prisoner in the Caucasus --3
Bear-hunt --
What men live by (1881) --
Memoirs of a madman (1884) --
A spark neglected burns the house (1885) --
Two old men (1885) --
Where love is, god is (1885) --
The story of Iván the fool (1885) --
Evil allures, but good endures --
Little girls wiser than men --
Ilyás --
The death of Iván Ilých (1886) --2
Three hermits (1886) --
Imp and the crust (1886) --
How much land does a man need? (1886) --3
Grain as big as a hen's egg (1886) --
The godson (1886) --
The repentant sinner (1886) --
*The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) --
The Devil (1890) --
Father Sergius (1890-98) --
*The empty drum (1891) --
Françoise (1892) --
Talk among leisured people (1893) --
Walk in the light while there is light (1893) --
The coffee-house of Surat (1893) --
*Master and man (1895) --
Too dear! (1897) --3
Hadji Murád (1896-1904) --
Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (1903) --
Work, death and sickness (1903) --
Three questions (1903) --3
Fëdor kuzmích (1905) --
History of yesterday (1851) --
Christmas night (1853) --
After the ball (1903) --3
Forged coupon (1904) --
Alyosha the pot (1905) --2
What for? (1906) --