The Forged Coupon: Other Stories

by Leo Tolstoy

The Forged Coupon are two novellas by Leo Tolstoy. Although he initially considered this story in the late 1890s, he didn't start writing until 1902. After quite a long battle, he finally finished the story in 1904; nevertheless, it was not distributed until Tolstoy's death in 1910 when a more limited collection of works was collected and selected. The story is divided into two parts. In the first part, student Mitya urgently needs cash to pay off the debt, but his father angrily refused his help. Tolstoy wrote this novella during his declining years, and after he was expelled, he was happy to have the opportunity to expose "false piety and false reverence to coordinated religion." However, he maintains a firm belief in the ability of humans to discover the truth, so the story remains confident, especially in the second part, which shows that acts of kindness can affect others, like a cascading influence.

95 pages, Paperback

Published July 27, 2021

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.