Short Stories About a Deal with the Devil

by Leo Tolstoy, David Shaw-Parker (Narrator), Elliot Fitzpatrick (Narrator)

It’s really very simple. You will sell me your eternal soul and in return I shall make you fabulously rich, powerful, talented and famous for your entire Earthly life. Or maybe even eternity.

For an atheist it’s a great deal, though it does suggest atheism may have a weak point. For those of faith it’s a matter of jam now and purgatory tomorrow. A bargain many artists feel is something they can live with. For agnostics it’s usually a question of can the afterlife really be that bad, would workplace regulations reach all parts of heaven and hell.

However, in this volume the terms are agreed and the Devil pays his fees and the character his dues, each happy to wait a few decades for the eternal payback.

For us, it’s all a moot point. We would never offer up such a deal. After all just listen to the stories of those who have.

01 - Short Stories About a Deal with the Devil - An Introduction

02 - How Much Land Does A Man Need by Leo Tolstoy

03 - Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

04 - Belphagor by Niccolo Machiavelli

05 - St Johns Eve by Nikolai Gogol

06 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson

07 - The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving

08 - The Generous Gambler by Charles Baudelaire

09 - A Journey of Little Profit by John Buchan

10 - From the Memoirs of Satan by Wilhelm Hauff

11 - The Devil's Wager by William Makepeace Thackeray

12 - Madam Lucifer by Richard Garnett

13 - Wake Not the Dead - Part 1 by Ernst Raupach

14 - Wake Not the Dead - Part 2 by Ernst Raupach

Audible Audio

Published March 28, 2024

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