Short Novels: Stories of Love, Seduction & Peasant Life

by Leo Tolstoy, Ernest J. Simmons (Editor)

Two hussars. A landlord's morning. Family happiness. Polikúsha. The cossacks

Genres: Short Stories

455 pages

Published October 12, 1979

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.

Reviews

[Sebadiaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tolstoy is a literary master and these short novels confirm it once more. The only tale that seems very out of place to our modern sensibilities and therefore does not hold up is 'Family Happiness'. I picked up this collection for Polikushka and I thought it was the best of the book. An amazing tale that zig-zags between humor, darkness, pity, excitement, and morality in a short 70 pages.

[Jane]

Okay. Didn't exactly make it through the first story in the collection... ah, "Two Hussars," despite multiple attempts. Suppose I could skip ahead to another one, but oh my. It was frickin' excruciating.

[Pitam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book.

[colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

read 07.18.90