Kirjahaku

1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world's most famous author. But fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in isolation. But as we learn through the journals of those closest to him, the battle for Tolstoy's soul will not be a peaceful one. Jay Parini introduces, translates and edits this collection of Tolstoy's autobiographical writing, diaries, and letters related to the last year of Tolstoy's life published to coincide with the 2009 film of Parini's novel The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year.

Leo Tolstoy combined detailed physical description with perceptive psychological insight to sweep aside the sham of surface appearances and lay bare man's intimate gestures, acts, and thoughts. Murder and sacrifice...greed and devotion...lust and affection...vanity and love--one by one, in this volume of great stories, Tolstoy dissects the basic drives, emotions, and motives of ordinary people searching for self-knowledge and spiritual perfection. Chekhov said, "Of authors my favorite is Tolstoy." And Turgenev "marveled at the strength of his huge talent...It sends a cold shudder even down my back...He is a master, a master." Now with a new introduction by Regina Marler and an afterword by Hugh McLean.

A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, Anna Karenina portrays the moving story of people whose emotions conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband (and Russian high society) would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Anna and Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman Konstantine Levin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life, haunted by thoughts of suicide, Levin's struggles echo Tolstoy's own spiritual crisis. But Anna's inner turmoil mirrors the own emotional imprisonment and mental disintegration of a woman who dares to transgress the strictures of a patriarchal world. In Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy brought to perfection the novel of social realism and created a masterpiece that bared the Russian soul.

Leo Tolstoy's earliest published work, the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, was written when he was in his twenties, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of the literary talents that would come to fruition in his later masterpieces. Chronicling the experiences of a wealthy landowner's son as he grows up and becomes aware of the world and his place in it, these three short novels were only loosely inspired by Tolstoy's own memories. In old age he condemned the work as "an awkward mixture of fact and fiction," but the imaginative powers that enabled him to capture so vividly the universal emotions and sensations of childhood have enthralled generations of readers. We are blessed to have, alongside the mature writer of Anna Karenina and War and Peace and the revolutionary mystic of the later years, the young Tolstoy who wrote these elegiac tales. In their sensitivity to nature and their evocations of fugitive feelings, they reveal his genius in all its untroubled early splendor.

"The Kingdom Of God Is Within You" is one of the most provocative anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian pieces of literature ever written. In the context of a sincere and scathing account of what is living and dead in modern Christianity, Tolstoy presents a view of history and society that overcomes widely recognised theoretical contradictions implicit in his monumental early novel, "War and Peace". At the focal point of "The Kingdom Of God Is Within You" is the doctrine of radical non-violence that Tolstoy understands Jesus to have articulated in the Sermon on the Mount's injunction against responding to evil with evil. Though the treatise was banned upon completion in 1893, this quickly translated and widely disseminated work was destined to become the most powerful and influential of his major late period writings.

Originally published in 1916, this book contains the Russian text of Tolstoy's 1855 work Sevastopol Sketches. An editorial introduction and textual notes are included in English. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Tolstoy and Russian literature.

This edition brings together Tolstoy’s 1886 masterpiece and several shorter works that connect with it in thought-provoking ways. The stories are accompanied by a fascinating selection of contextual materials, including nineteenth-century reviews, excerpts from Tolstoy’s letters concerning death, excerpts from a pamphlet he wrote after witnessing the slaughtering of livestock, and a portfolio of relevant photographs. As well as crafting fresh translations both of the stories themselves and of the background materials, Kirsten Lodge has provided an illuminating introduction and helpful annotations.

War and Peace tells the story of five families struggling for survival during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Among its many unforgettable characters is Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, who, despising the artifice of high society, joins the army to achieve glory. The novel's other hero, the bumbling Pierre Bezukhov, tries to find meaning in life through a series of philosophical systems. He at last discovers the Tolstoyan truth that wisdom is to be found not in systems but in the ordinary processes of daily life. Both an intimate study of individual passions and an epic historical novel, War and Peace is nothing less than a complete portrait of human existence.

Ranging in scope from lengthy novellas to fables and folktales only a few pages long, Leo Tolstoy's short fiction provides a marvelous opportunity to become closely acquainted with Russia's great novelist. Volume 2 of the Collected Shorter Fiction reveals howTolstoy's growing spiritual preoccupations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces that equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power. Readers of The Death of Iv n Il ch, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, Master and Man, and Hadji Mur d will recognize the brilliant novelist now transfigured by his passionate quest for salvation and forgiveness. Aylmer and Louise Maude's classic translations are supplemented by new translations by Nigel J. Cooper of six stories, including two that have never before appeared in English.

Written over a period of more than half a century, Leo Tolstoy's stories reflect every aspect of his art and personality. They cover his experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus, his married life, his passionate interest in the peasantry, his cult of truth and simplicity, and his growing preoccupation with religion. The stories in Volume 1 of the Collected Shorter Fiction date from the period in which the young Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Ranging from brief, masterfully sketches of military life such as "The Wood-Felling" to novellas like Family Happiness, an uneasy imagining of the idyllic possibilities of marriage by the not-yet-married writer, all feature Tolstoy's characteristically lavish deployment of detail, shrewd observation, and imaginative power. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude