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.

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`To love him was not enough for me after the happiness I had felt in falling in love. I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.' Leo Tolstoy, known to the world for his famous novels, also created throughout his sixty-year career as a writer a significant body of works of shorter ficiton. These fictions, like his novels, tend toward a uniqueness in form, even as they explore a set of themes common in the longer works. The four novellas selected here stand closest to the novels, and represent Tolstoy at his creative best, exploring in a specific and focused way his characteristic themes: life understood as a journey of the discovery of identity and vocation, the meaning of one's life in the face of death, and the redemptive role of suffering and compassion. Family Happiness (1859) traces the psychology of failed married love yet is written against the tradition of the novel of romance, marriage and adultery. The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) recounts a husband's addictions, jealousy, sinister guilt and subsequent isolation, while The Cossacks (1863) focuses on the experiences of a young Russian on in the Caucusus whose quest for romantic love becomes one for the love of 'the whole of God's world'. Finally, the superbly crafted Hadji Murád (1905) juxtaposes the military and civilian worlds, and relates a tale of the human violation of the natural through a series of parallel episodes. Written over a period of almost fifty years, these works display Tolstoy's changing views on art and sexuality, women and marriage, nationalism and ethnicity, war and empire. All four novellas develop, each in its own unique way, the central Tolystoyan theme of love. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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.