Leo Tolstoy
1) Childhood
It happened in the 'seventies in winter, on the day after St. Nicholas's Day. There was a fete in the parish and the innkeeper, Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov, a Second Guild merchant, being a church elder had to go to church, and had also to entertain his relatives and friends at home.
But when the last of them had gone he at once began to prepare to drive over to see a neighbouring proprietor about a grove which he had been bargaining over
...Sometimes even the smallest and most seemingly trivial actions can have the most disastrous consequences. That's the idea that Russian literary master Leo Tolstoy explores in depth in the title tale in this collection, The Forged Coupon. This anthology brings together some of Tolstoy's finest short stories and novellas, and it is sure to please long-time fans of his work or new readers looking for an accessible entry point from which to
...An alternate translation of Tolstoy's classic novella, Family Happiness, this tale revisits a theme that resonates throughout Tolstoy's work and is perhaps best elucidated in Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." A young woman who is still reeling from the death of her mother agrees to be wed to a much older family friend, but soon finds out that married life is not all it's
...A young man, Olenin, is stationed in the Caucasus, where he falls in love with the place, the people, and the simple way of life. Though he has fallen in love with the betrothed of a man he has befriended, he believes that he can be self-sacrificing, until a fellow Russian brings the complexity of Moscow-thinking back to Olenin.
Today, Leo Tolstoy is best remembered for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both epic, sweeping works that unfold on a grand scale. But Tolstoy also dabbled in short-form fiction, and the results are similarly remarkable. This volume brings together a number of Tolstoy's shorter pieces, including A Russian Proprietor and The Three Deaths.
12) What to Do?
Today, Leo Graf Tolstoy is regarded as one of world's foremost masters of prose. In his lifetime, he was responsible for creating such works of genius as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In addition to his keen insight into the small details of family life, Tolstoy had a penetrating perspective on the sweeping social trends facing Russia and the world at large. Both themes are explored at length in What to Do?
13) Boyhood
14) Anna Karenina
16) My religion
17) The Cossacks
A brilliant short novel inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s experience as a soldier in the Caucasus, The Cossacks has all the energy and poetry of youth while also foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy’s later years. His naïve hero, Olenin, is a young nobleman who is disenchanted with his privileged and superficial existence in Moscow and hopes to find a simpler life in a Cossack village. As Olenin foolishly involves himself in
...18) What is art?
A successful man must face the terror of his own mortality in this masterful nineteenth-century Russian novella by the author of War and Peace.
In his later years, Leo Tolstoy began to contemplate the inescapable realities of mortality—its terrifying mystery, its many indignities, and the way it forces one to look back on the legacy and regrets of one’s life. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, widely considered the
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