Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (Perennial Classics) | Leo Tolstoy

Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (Perennial Classics) | Leo Tolstoy | Death of Ivan Ilych is probably the best thing Tolstoy ever wrote

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Great Short Works ...

	Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (Perennial Classics) Leo Tolstoy Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004 - 720 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The brilliant shorter novels of Tolstoy, including The Death of Ivan Ilych and Family Happiness, collected and reissued with a beautiful updated design.

Of all Russian writers Leo Tolstoy is probably the best known to the Western world, largely because of War and Peace, his epic in prose, and Anna Karenina, one of the most splendid novels in any language. But during his long lifetime Tolstoy also wrote enough shorter works to fill many volumes. Here reprinted in one volume are his eight finest short novels, together with "Alyosha the Pot", the little tale that Prince Mirsky described as "a masterpiece of rare perfection."

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Best single volume of the short fiction

I prefer the Everyman's volumes because the typesetting is so much nicer. The present volume is a trade-sized paperback with the text simply photo-enlarged from the original mass-market edition. Both volumes use the Maudes' translations, but the Everyman's includes a great many more stories, including the Sevastopol Sketches. On the other hand, Everyman's publishes The Cossacks as a third volume, whereas you get that in here and all the other can't-miss stories.

If you can't afford the Everyman's, this is the one to get.

Death of Ivan Ilych is probably the best thing Tolstoy ever wrote

With that work being the main concern of this review, I must say that probably the most facinating thing about Tolstoy the artist, the man, the philosopher is his lifelong horror and obsession of death. He was a lifelong deathwatcher and with a distinctive brilliance does he describe death in his works, Ivan Ilych being the culmination of his concern with death.

Dostoevsky is without a shadow of a doubt my favorite writer and with that being stated is the obvious superior of his great tempororay Tolstoy. I sometimes regret this because it sometimes blinds me to Tolstoy's greatness. In the case of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy shines through in all of his literary genius. With this 1886 short novel, one can easily see Tolstoy the literary artist. He chooses a judge who never gives death a thought and yet condemns accused to death. Tolstoy hated judges and one perceives that there is a slight sinister Chekhovian schadenfreude to the title character's sufferings and epiphany in the great Lion as he wrote this one. I remember slightly the storm of thought which surged within me when I finished reading this work about a year ago. Never before had I read a work with a simple plot work laced through with character intrigue (and in this case Tolstoy gets alongside and may have even beaten Dostoevsky when it comes to the latter's utter phenomenal mastry over creating facinating characters) and the philosophical force of a bullet train.

Everyone must at one point in their lives read Tolstoy's incredible work, The Death of Ivan Ilych. It is not only what I would consider to be the greatest short novel ever written but is a testament to the philosophical anguish of a great mind rendered into haunting brilliance and a beauty which leaves its mark upon the stunned reader, never to recover over the magnificence that is Tolstoy.

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Simply Put: An Outstanding Collection

According to many critics, Tolstoy (1828 to 1910) is viewed as one of the greatest novelists of all time, particularly noted for his historical novel War and Peace and later the novel Anna Karenina. The two novels are among the best novels ever written, and depict life in 19th century Russia. Tolstoy was associated with the realism movement and as such his writings are graphic and compelling. The present book is a bargain and brings the reader some of his best short works.

Tolstoy was born on his father's estate in Central Russia, attended college, and joined the military. He served in Chechnya and wrote about his experiences, and later served in Sevastopol where he was involved in intensive fighting. He wrote about life in the Russia military, and he wrote about other historical military events such as the Napoleonic wars. He wrote about historical events and he wrote about people and the mundane events of life. The short novel The Cossacks (included here) came from this early experiences in the military.

War and Peace (1865-69) is generally thought to be one of the greatest and most complicated novels ever written including over 500 characters and a variety of historical details on the Napoleonic wars. Anna Karenina (1877) followed later. It is a beautifully written story of a farmer (Levin) and a woman (Anna ¨Karenina) who have two parallel and loosely interconnected lives.

In addition to those primary novels, Tolstoy wrote other major novels, novellas, and short stories. Some of the best of his writings are here in this collection. They include the important work "The Death of Ivan Ilych" which is a profound but short work, and possibly one of the best novels of all time. There are others such as "The Cossacks," "The Devil," and one of my favorite short stories "Master and Man." Also, there are other stories such as the emotional "Father Sergius," a story that was published later but was a favorite of Tolstoy. Personally speaking, I was not too excited by his tale Hadji Murad, but the other stories are just superb.

The stories here are mostly good to great, and are all a bit different, and all are easy to read. Shakespeare was perhaps the greatest writer ever, but as great as he was, most find the writings of Shakespeare to be a bit opaque. But Tolstoy is completely different. Most stories are clear, easy to read, and they are engaging and compelling. This is a wonderful collection of the best writing by one of the world's great writers.

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worth reading

I may be missing something, but the three short stories I read from this Tolstoy collection were good but nothing superspecial. From what I understand War and Peace and Anna Kerrenina are really his masterpieces, but The Death of Ivan Ilych is also well-known. There may also have been something missing in translation as well as across time and culture.

I also read The Devil and The Kreutzer Sonata. Curiously, all three stories all inevitably lead to a death. Cossacks was written 1852-62, while the others were written much later in the mid 1880's. I felt that the later stories had a much more refined writing technique, so I never finished Cossacks.

So those of you who want to get a taste of Tolstoy, these short stories may suffice, though I have a feeling that the only way to "taste" Tolstoy is to take that really big bite and read his major masterpieces.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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