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 how Tolstoy'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.

Author Biography

John Bayley, author of the Introduction to the collection, is former Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and the author of books on Tolstoy, Hardy, and Housman. He has also written several novels and a memoir, Elegy for Iris. The translators: Aylmer Maude spent much of his life in Russia and was a personal friend of Tolstoy's. Nigel J. Cooper recently retired from Middlesex University, where he was a principal lecturer in modern languages (Russian and French).