Resurrection

Serving on a jury at the trial of a prostitute arrested for murder, Prince Nekhlyudov is horrified to discover that the accused is a woman he had once loved, seduced and then abandoned when she was a young servant girl. Racked with guilt at realising he was the cause of her ruin, he determines to appeal for her release or give up his own way of life and follow her.

A Confession ...

Describing Tolstoy’s crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. By the time he was 50, Tolstoy had already written the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was ‘a happy man’ and in good health — yet life had lost its meaning. In this poignant confessional fragment, he records a period of his life when he began to turn away from fiction and aesthetics, and to search instead for ‘a practical religion not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth’.

Master and Man

The 10 stories collected in this volume demonstrate Tolstoy’s artistic prowess displayed over five decades — experimenting with prose styles and drawing on his own experiences with humour, realism and compassion. Inspired by his experiences in the army, The Two Hussars contrasts a dashing father and his mean-spirited son. Illustrating Tolstoy’s belief that art must serve a moral purpose, What Men Live By portrays an angel sent to earth to learn three existential rules of life, and Two Old Men shows a peasant abandoning his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to help his neighbours.

The Kreutzer Sonata

This volume includes Family Happiness, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil and Father Sergius. The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. Tolstoy knows that his readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously or desperately sought the approval and even worship of others. Tolstoy depends on our own memories to entagle us in his tragic stories.

What is Art?

During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These works culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Impassioned and iconoclastic, this powerfully influential work both criticises the elitist nature of art in nineteenth-century Western society, and rejects the idea that its sole purpose should be the creation of beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire and Wagner are all vigorously condemned as Tolstoy explores what he believes to be the spiritual role of the artist — arguing that true art must work with religion and science as a force for the advancement of mankind.

The Cossacks

In 1851, at the age of 22, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed were among the most significant in his life, and deeply influenced the stories collected here. Begun in 1852 but unfinished for a decade, The Cossacks describes the experiences of Olenin, a young cultured Russian who comes to despise civilisation after spending time with the wild Cossack people. Sevastopol Sketches, based on Tolstoy’s own experiences of the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55, is a compelling consideration of the nature of war, while Hadji Murat, written towards the end of his life, returns to the Caucasus of Tolstoy’s youth to explore the life of a great leader torn apart by a conflict of loyalties. Written at the end of the nineteenth century, it is amongst the last and greatest of Tolstoy’s shorter works.