“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” with a career spanning almost half a century, Leo Tolstoy penned down some of the world’s greatest and most celebrated works. This edition brings for you his thirty-five best short stories ranging from stories for children, stories for the people, and Russian folk tales to his adaptations from French stories and the ones written for the Jewish pogrom victims in Russia. It includes ‘the snowstorm’ (1856), ‘polikushka’ (1863), ‘The prisoner of the Caucasus’ (1872), ‘where love is, there God is also’ (1885), ‘two old men’ (1885), ‘Ivan the fool’ (1885), ‘kholstomír’ (1885), ‘The Imp and the crust’ (1886), ‘The coffee house of Surat’ (1893), ‘master and man’ (1895), ‘father sergius’, ‘work, death and sickness’, ‘after the dance’, and ‘Alyosha the pot’ (1911), among his other masterpieces. An editorial note precedes each work.

Product description

About the Author

Born in Russia in 1828, Leo Tolstoy grew up to become a novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and philosopher. A master of realistic fiction he had little interest in academics when he was young. In 1851 he enlisted himself in the Russian army and served in the Crimean War (1854-1856). He records his experience in Sevastopol Stories (1855). Tolstoy produced an autobiographical novel, Childhood (1852), followed by Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857) which earned him literary acclaim. War and Peace (1865-1869) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877) remain two of his greatest novels. In his short autobiographical story, A Confession (1882), Tolstoy reflects on his mid-life existential crisis. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and What Is It To Be Done led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 for a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy. The Kingdom of God Is Within You expresses his ideas on non-violent resistance. In the last few days of his life, while his health was deteriorating, he separated from his wife and left home. He died of pneumonia at a train station in 1910, at the age of 82.