ALSO TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Fyodor Dostoevsky
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Fyodor Dostoevsky
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoevsky
DEMONS by Fyodor Dostoevsky
DEAD SOULS by Nikolai Gogol
THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES by Fyodor Dostoevsky
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov
THE COLLECTED TALES OF NIKOLAI GOGOL
ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy
WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy
STORIES by Anton Chekhov
THE COMPLETE SHORT NOVELS OF ANTON CHEKHOV
THE IDIOT by Fyodor Dostoevsky
THE ADOLESCENT by Fyodor Dostoevsky
THE DOUBLE AND THE GAMBLER by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE PRISONER OF THE CAUCASUS
THE DIARY OF A MADMAN
THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH
THE KREUTZER SONATA
THE DEVIL
MASTER AND MAN
FATHER SERGIUS
AFTER THE BALL
THE FORGED COUPON
ALYOSHA THE POT
HADJI MURAT
GLOSSARY OF CAUCASIAN MOUNTAINEER WORDS
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
THERE MAY BE SUCH A THING as an “O. Henry story;” there may even be such a thing as a “Chekhov story;” but, as readers of this collection will discover, there is no such thing as a “Tolstoy story.” From the narrative simplicity of The Prisoner of the Caucasus to the psychopathological density of The Kreutzer Sonata, from the intense single focus of The Death of Ivan Ilyich to the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of The Forged Coupon, from the rustic immediacy of Master and Man to the complex (and still highly relevant) geopolitical reality of Hadji Murat, from the rough jottings of The Diary of a Madman to the limpid perfection of Alyosha the Pot, Tolstoy was constantly reinventing the art of fiction for himself.
The eleven stories in this collection were written, with one exception, after 1880—that is, in the last thirty years of Tolstoy’s long life (1828–1910). The one exception is The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which dates to 1872, the period between War and Peace and Anna Karenina, when Tolstoy busied himself with the education of the peasant children on his estate. Dissatisfied with the textbooks available, he decided to write his own, producing in the same year both an ABC and a reader which included, among other things, The Prisoner of the Caucasus and God Sees the Truth but Waits. Twenty-six years later, in his polemical treatise What Is Art?, laying down the principles for distinguishing between good and bad art in our time, he stated that there are only two kinds of good art: “(1) religious art, which conveys feelings coming from a religious consciousness of man’s position in the world with regard to God and his neighbor; and (2) universal art, which conveys the simplest everyday feelings of life, such as are accessible to everyone in the world.” In a note he added: “I rank my own artistic works on the side of bad art, except for the story God Sees the Truth, which wants to belong to the first kind, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the second.” We have included The Prisoner here, first, on its own merits. It shows very well how Tolstoy, for all the constraints his pedagogical and polemical intentions placed upon him, never lost that “gift of concrete evocation” which the French scholar and translator Michel Aucouturier rightly calls “the secret of his art.” And, second, because it balances nicely with the last piece in the collection, also set in the Caucasus, the novella Hadji Murat, finished in 1904 and published posthumously in 1912.
The stories written for his school reader were Tolstoy’s first attempt, after the immense inclusiveness of War and Peace, to purge his art of what he came to regard as its artistic pretensions and superfluous detail. The same attempt was repeated time and again later in his life, testifying to the constant conflict within him between his innate artistic gift and the moral demands he made upon himself, the conflict, as he understood it, between beauty and the good. In his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky repeats a story told him by his friend Sulerzhitsky about the elderly Tolstoy in Moscow which shows how alive that conflict remained:
Suler tells how he was once walking with Lev Nikolaevich in Tverskaya Street when Tolstoy noticed in the distance two soldiers of the Guards. The metal of their accoutrements shone in the sun; their spurs jingled; they kept step like one man; their faces, too, shone with the self-assurance of strength and youth. Tolstoy began to grumble at them: “What pompous stupidity! Like animals trained by the whip …”
But when the guardsmen came abreast with him, he stopped, followed them caressingly with his eyes, and said enthusiastically: “How handsome! Old Romans, eh, Lyovushka? Their strength and beauty! O Lord! How charming it is when man is handsome, how very charming.”
By 1873 Tolstoy had dropped his pedagogical efforts and plunged into work on a new novel, Anna Karenina, equally filled with “superfluous detail and artistic pretensions,” and equally limited to the lives of the Russian aristocracy, not in history now but in his own time and milieu. Here the conflicting claims of art and moral judgment strike a very difficult balance, and its precariousness is strongly felt. The novel marks a major turning point in Tolstoy’s life, the end of what might be called his idyllic period. D. S. Mirsky, in A History of Russian Literature, notes in Anna Karenina “the approach of a more tragic God than the blind and good life-God of War and Peace. The tragic atmosphere thickens as the story advances towards the end.” And it is not only the tragedy of Anna herself. By 1877, when he was writing the final chapters, both Tolstoy and his hero and likeness, Konstantin Levin, found themselves in a profound spiritual crisis. The novel “ends on a note of confused perplexity,” writes Mirsky; it “dies like a cry of anguish in the desert air.” The note is struck in Levin’s reflections once he has attained all he wanted in life, all that the younger Tolstoy thought a man needs for happiness—a good marriage, children, a flourishing estate. He is haunted by doubts: “What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?” These questions, which bring Levin close to suicide, find an answer in his reconciliation with the Church. Levin asks himself, “Can I believe in everything the Church confesses?” And decides, rather hastily, that “there was not a single belief of the Church that violated the main thing—faith in God, in the good, as the sole purpose of man.” “Serving the good instead of one’s needs” became Levin’s watchword, as it became Tolstoy’s. But for Tolstoy, at least, the reconciliation was an uneasy one, undermined by latent contradictions, and it did not last long.