Tolstoy’s Short Fiction

The Louise and Aylmer Maude translations of Tolstoy’s short fiction, revised by the editor for enhanced comprehension, and annotated for student readers, comprise our text. The ten short stories included, written between 1855 and 1905, have been carefully chosen by the editor as representing the best of Tolstoy’s shorter work both before War and Peace and after Anna Karenina.

Backgrounds and Sources include two Tolstoy memoirs, A History of Yesterday (1851) and The Memoirs of a Madman (1884), as well as excerpts from Tolstoy’s diaries and letters that shed light on his ethos.
Criticism contains nineteen wide-ranging essays by both Russian and Western scholars. Included are essays by Gary Saul Morson, N. G. Chernyshevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, John Bayley, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Green, N. K. Mikhailovsky, and Donald Barthelme, among others.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.