
’When we read Tolstoy, it feels easy. This is life itself’ Howard Jacobson ’No other writer wrote so often, or so imaginatively, about the actual moment of dying’ Orlando Figes Tolstoy’s stories contain many of the most acutely observed moments in his monumental body of work. This new selection of his shorter works, sensitively translated by the award-winning Boris Dralyuk, showcases the peerless economy with which Tolstoy could render the passions and conflicts of a life. These are works that take us from a self-interested judge’s agonising deathbed to the bristling social world of horses in a stable yard, from the joyful vanity of youth to the painful doubts of sickness and old age. With unwavering precision, Tolstoy’s eye brings clarity and richness to the simplest materials.
Author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.