The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sevastopol wroteThe Sevastopol Sketches(1855-6), which established his literary reputation. Among his best known novels areWar and Peace(1869) andAnna Karenina(1877). In 1910 at the age of eighty-two he fled from home 'leaving this worldly life in order to live out my last days in peace and solitude'; dying some days later at the station master's house at Astapovo.


Donna Tussing Orwin, who teaches Russian Literature at the University of Toronto, was Editor ofTolstoy Studies Journalfrom 1997-2004, and is now President of the North American Tolstoy Society. She is editor ofThe Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy(2002) and is currently editing a collection of newly commissioned essays about Tolstoy to be published in Russia in 2010 by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction.
It showcases the questioning, unsettling and perfectly crafted prose of the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace.
In Roger Cockrell's fluid rendering in English, the story shines and glimmers beautifully.