While perhaps best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the Russian author and religious thinker Leo Tolstoy was also a prolific author of short fiction. This Standard Ebooks edition compiles all of Tolstoy's short stories and novellas written from 1852 up to his death, arranged in order of their original publication.
The stories in this collection vary enormously in size and scope, from short, page-length fables composed for the education of schoolchildren, to full novellas like "Family Happiness." Readers who are familiar with Tolstoy's life and religious experiences-as detailed, for example, in his spiritual memoir A Confession-may be able to trace the events of Tolstoy's life through the changing subjects of these stories. Some early stories, like "The Raid" and the "Sevastopol" sketches, draw from Tolstoy's experiences in the Caucasian War and the Crimean War when he served in the Imperial Russian Army, while other early stories like "Recollections of a Scorer" and "Two Hussars" reflect Tolstoy's personal struggle with gambling addiction.
With hundreds of individual pieces spanning five decades of Tolstoy's career, this sweeping collection offers an unparalleled window into the evolution of one of literature's greatest minds, moving from youthful war stories and tales of gambling and passion to the profound moral parables of his later years. Whether discovering Tolstoy's short fiction for the first time or seeking a definitive one-volume reference, readers will find stories here rarely gathered together in a single edition.
Later stories in the collection, written during and after Tolstoy's 1870s conversion to Christian anarcho-pacifism (a spiritual and religious philosophy described in detail in his treatise The Kingdom of God Is Within You), frequently reflect either Tolstoy's own experiences in spiritual struggle (e.g. "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch") or his interpretation of the New Testament (e.g. "The Forged Coupon"), or both. Many later stories, like "Three Questions" and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" are explicitly didactic in nature and are addressed to a popular audience to promote his religious ideals and views on social and economic justice.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking L