Leo Tolstoy

In 1851 Leo Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army and was sent to the Caucasus to help defeat the Chechens. During this war a great Avar chieftain, Hadji Murad, broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety. Months later, while attempting to rescue his family from Shamil's prison, Hadji Murad was pursued by those he had betrayed and, after fighting the most heroic battle of his life, was killed. Tolstoy, witness to many of the events leading to Hadji Murad's death, set down this story with painstaking accuracy to preserve for future generations the horror, nobility, and destruction inherent in war.

Begun in 1851, when Tolstoy was twenty-three and serving as a cadet in the Russian army, «Childhood», the first part of Tolstoy’s first novel, won immediate praise from Turgenev and others, and marked Tolstoy’s emergence as a major writer. Its originality was striking, as Tolstoy sought to communicate with great immediacy the “poetry” of childhood — the intense emotions, confusions, and fears attendant upon a young boy, Nikolenka, as he grows up. In the years following, «Boyhood» and «Youth» appeared (a fourth volume was planned but never executed), each replete with psychological and philosophical subtleties hitherto unknown in Russian literature. In Scammell’s resplendent translation, «Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth» remains one of Tolstoy’s major works.

Written over a period of more than half a century, these stories reflect every aspect of Tolstoy's 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 adn simplicity, and, above all, his growing preoccupation with religion. Ranging in scope from novellas like The Kreutzer Sonata and Hadji Murad to folk-tales only a few pages long, they provide a marvelous opportunity to become closely acquainted with Russia's great novelist. 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.

The only comprehensive hardcover edition of Tolstoy's shorter fiction — 57 stories and novellas, including two that have never before appeared in English. In these two handsome volumes, every aspect of Tolstoy's art and personality is reflected: his experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus, his married life, his passionate interest in the peasantry, his belief in truth and simplicity, and above all, his growing preoccupation with religion. Ranging in scope from the short novels «Hadj Murad» and «The Kreutzer Sonata» to folktales only a few pages long, they bring us intimately into the world of the great Russian novelist.

When Marshal of the Nobility Pozdnyshev suspects his wife of having an affair with her music partner, his jealousy consumes him and drives him to murder. Controversial upon publication in 1890, The Kreutzer Sonata illuminates Tolstoy’s then-feverish Christian ideals, his conflicts with lust and the hypocrisies of nineteenth-century marriage, and his thinking on the role of art and music in society. In her Introduction, Doris Lessing shows how relevant The Kreutzer Sonata is to our understanding of Tolstoy the artist, as well as to feminism and literature. This Modern Library Paperback Classic also contains Tolstoy’s Sequel to the Kruetzer Sonata.

This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the frontiers of nineteenth-century Russia — completed in 1862, when Tolstoy was in his early thirties — has always surprised readers who know Tolstoy best through the vast, panoramic fictions of his middle years. Unlike those works, The Cossacks is lean and supple, economical in design and execution.

A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn’t experience the same kind of emotional upheaval. Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs entirely to the woman whose name it bears, whose portrait is one of the truest ever made by a writer. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

Tolstoy's passionate and iconoclastic writings — on issues of faith, immortality, freedom, violence, and morality — reflect his intellectual search for truth and a religion firmly grounded in reality. The selection includes «A Confession», «Religion and Morality», «What Is Religion, and of What Does Its Essence Consist?» and «The Law of Love and the Law of Violence».

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.