Scan barcode
doug_whatzup's review against another edition
4.0
This collection of short stories and novellas are almost entirely from Tolstoy’s later writings, coming well after his famous religious conversion which followed on the heels of Anna Karenina. Most of the shorter stories propagate his newfound faith, a sort of Christian twist on Aesop’s Fables, except that the stories’ morals are clearly expressed within the text of the story rather than being added at the end of the children’s versions I remember reading as a kid. It also includes two of Tolstoy’s most widely praised novellas, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Hadji Murad, both of which I found supremely depressing. Ironically, I found the third well-known novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, to be, while disturbingly dark, deeply fascinating. That may say more about me than the story, but there it is.
These works are by no means representative of – or as purportedly great as – Tolstoy’s classic works, the above-mentioned Anna Karenina and War and Peace, but they do illustrate Tolstoy’s amazing, possibly unmatched skill at characterization. Writers are taught to show, not tell, and as Tolstoy nurses his often dark, sometimes mundane plot lines along, it becomes easier to relate to and empathize with his characters than those of any other writer I can think of. This particular quality of Tolstoy’s art is all the more evident in his shorter works as opposed to his massive masterworks, where most readers need a wall chart to keep track of all the characters.
The vast majority of these tales are sad and dispiriting, reflective of Tolstoy’s disillusion with Tsarist Russia, along with its corrupt bourgeoisie, structural inequality, and top-down moral hypocrisy and decay. Written between the mid 1880s and 1906, four years prior to Tolstoy’s death and a decade prior to the beginning of the Russian revolution, these stories offer a fascinating and illuminative perspective on pre-Soviet Russia, one that helps the reader understand Soviet history and Russia today.
For people my age, who as kids were told that cowering under our school desks would somehow protect us from the nearby detonation of a Russian atom bomb, who’s first consciousness of geopolitics was Sputnik, or the Bay of Pigs, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, who lived through the Cold War and, finally, watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia is the great bugaboo of our childhood. People who remember none of those things seem to consider Putin’s Russia a great menace yet today; those people could stand to gain a little perspective by reading their Tolstoy.
These works are by no means representative of – or as purportedly great as – Tolstoy’s classic works, the above-mentioned Anna Karenina and War and Peace, but they do illustrate Tolstoy’s amazing, possibly unmatched skill at characterization. Writers are taught to show, not tell, and as Tolstoy nurses his often dark, sometimes mundane plot lines along, it becomes easier to relate to and empathize with his characters than those of any other writer I can think of. This particular quality of Tolstoy’s art is all the more evident in his shorter works as opposed to his massive masterworks, where most readers need a wall chart to keep track of all the characters.
The vast majority of these tales are sad and dispiriting, reflective of Tolstoy’s disillusion with Tsarist Russia, along with its corrupt bourgeoisie, structural inequality, and top-down moral hypocrisy and decay. Written between the mid 1880s and 1906, four years prior to Tolstoy’s death and a decade prior to the beginning of the Russian revolution, these stories offer a fascinating and illuminative perspective on pre-Soviet Russia, one that helps the reader understand Soviet history and Russia today.
For people my age, who as kids were told that cowering under our school desks would somehow protect us from the nearby detonation of a Russian atom bomb, who’s first consciousness of geopolitics was Sputnik, or the Bay of Pigs, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, who lived through the Cold War and, finally, watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia is the great bugaboo of our childhood. People who remember none of those things seem to consider Putin’s Russia a great menace yet today; those people could stand to gain a little perspective by reading their Tolstoy.
More...