Ce qu’il faut de terre à l’homme

by Leo Tolstoy, Léon Tolstoï

Short story
translated by Ély Halpérine-Kaminsky
James Joyce, dans une lettre à sa fille datée d’avril 1935, écrivait qu’il tenait Ce qu’il faut de terre à l’homme pour « la plus grande histoire jamais écrite ».

Dans ce conte fantastique sur la cupidité et la vanité des désirs humains, Tolstoï raconte comment un paysan russe trop ambitieux voit tout à coup ses projets étrangement favorisés par le Diable…

Inspiré à son auteur par un séjour dans la province de Samara, sur les terres des peuples bachkirs, Ce qu’il faut de terre à l’homme, publié en 1886, reste l’une des plus célèbres nouvelles de Tolstoï.

48 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2020

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

[Réginald VIANCIN · Rating 5 out of 5]

Court bouquin sur l'essentiel. Il dégage une morale simple et permet de se remettre les pieds sur terre avec des ondes positives malgré que la fin ne le soit pas. Vaut mieux courir derrière soi que derrière la vie/argent.