The Kreutzer Sonata and other stories - Lev Nikolajevič Tolstoj

‘How truth thickens and deepens when it migrates from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening is one of the thrills of Tolstoy’s stories’ Sharon Cameron in her preface to The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories This volume contains ‘Family Happiness’, ‘The Devil’ and ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, three of Tolstoy’s unhappy-marriage stories as well as ‘Father Sergius’, a story of a loss of identity in ambitious pursuit of holy virtue and ‘Master and Man’. A collection that looks at ambition in multiple forms, from romance to spirituality, and from youth to old age, the forces of life in these stories connect people through time, situation and space. Tolstoy’s antidotes to delusion, fear, jealousy, and even madness have a common ethical thread pulled through the fabric of very different narrative structures, themes, and genres, whether realist, didactic, or parabolic.