Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories
    Unavailable
    The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories
    Unavailable
    The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories
    Ebook264 pages4 hours

    The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories

    By Leo Tolstoy

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    One of the world's greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) also wrote numerous excellent short stories, three of which are contained in this volume. "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1891) is a penetrating study of jealousy as well as a splenetic complaint about the way in which society educates young men and women in matters of sex. In "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (1886), a symbolic Everyman discovers the inner light of faith and love only when confronted by death. "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886) is a simple, didactic story of peasant life, written by Tolstoy in the wake of a spiritual crisis. All three tales offer readers a splendid introduction to Tolstoy's work as well as the focused delights of the short story form brought to a pinnacle in the hands of a master.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateFeb 29, 2012
    ISBN9780486110622
    Unavailable
    The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories
    Author

    Leo Tolstoy

    Leo Tolstoy grew up in Russia, raised by a elderly aunt and educated by French tutors while studying at Kazen University before giving up on his education and volunteering for military duty. When writing his greatest works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy drew upon his diaries for material. At eighty-two, while away from home, he suffered from declining health and died in Astapovo, Riazan in 1910.

    Read more from Leo Tolstoy

    Related to The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories

    Titles in the series (60)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar

      Dec 18, 2018

      The fact that this isn’t recognized for what it is, a magisterial work and a 20th-century masterpiece, makes me even more anxious about our times. The post A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Reconstructing A Self-destructive Life

      Oct 27, 2022

      JOSEPH ROTH LIVED HIS LIFE on the peripheries and between the gaps of European civilisation. He was born in Brody, now in Ukraine but then a shtetl at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He yearned to escape west to Vienna, where he

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Living Mandelstam

      May 1, 2020

      It is common for English-language accounts of Mandelstam’s life to begin with an account of his death. Consider the first sentence of a twosentence biography that appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2016 to preface a translation by Andrew Dav

      13 min read

    • Article

      Visible Man

      Dec 2, 2019

      Visible Man
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sarah Thankam Mathews

      Dec 18, 2020

      By May I was clenching my teeth so hard when I slept that it eventually cracked a filling. The post A Year in Reading: Sarah Thankam Mathews appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Lifelong Habit of Being

      Jun 1, 2020

      DAYS AFTER THE 9/11 attacks, Susan Sontag noted the frequency with which the hijackers were being charged with cowardice: “[W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter,” she insisted in The New Yorker, “they were not cowards.” So

      4 min read

    • Article

      FROM THE WD EDITORS: Our favourite Beginnings and Endings

      Jul 31, 2019

      The best beginnings toss readers into the whirlwind that is going to be your story right as the action begins, giving them no choice but to read further. The best endings stick with readers for years after they’ve closed the book. WD editors got toge

      1 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2019

      Sep 5, 2019

      Eight new and notable collections you want on your nightstand this month, including work by a lost Catalan master and the latest from our new poet laureate. The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Room Of My Own

      Jun 15, 2020

      I finished reading Virginia Woolf ’s famous essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” late one night and lay in my bed musing. Fifty years earlier, in the 1920s, Woolf had argued that women needed independent space to be creative. Glancing across my studio at th

      2 min read

    • Article

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019

      Oct 15, 2019

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
      1 min read

    • Article

      No Detail Spared: ‘Warhol’ Expands On The Life Of The Pop Art Icon

      Jul 29, 2020

      Biographer Blake Gopnik mines the archives of the famously self-involved, and cannily entrepreneurial, painter of soup cans and Hollywood stars.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems by Eavan Boland

      May 1, 2020

      Four Poems by Eavan Boland
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jedediah Britton-Purdy

      Dec 11, 2019

      Books often bring the new for me, but this year they were more of a trace backward, stitching new experience into what underlay it. The post A Year in Reading: Jedediah Britton-Purdy appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      David Berman, Slacker God

      Aug 8, 2019

      David Berman, Slacker God
      3 min read

    Reviews for The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories

    3.5/5

    30 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Absolutely his best. The Kreutzer Sonata is way ahead of its time and shows, that in essence nothing has changed. When reading this book, listen to Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. It will help to understand the turmoil and depth of this novel.
    • 5/5
      Most do not like this book, but I enjoyed the stories and some of the lessons they teach. It is certainly a welcome change from War and Peace.
    • 4/5
      An excellent series of stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things and vice versa. Gives a good account of what it must have been like in Russia in that era.
    • 5/5
      This was my first glance into Tolstoy's fiction, and as I expected, I was blown away by his writing. The Death of Ivan Ilyich really captures human depravity and societal indifference to others. Ivan's personal and professional lives hardly serve any other function than to build and reinforce his appearance, and are therefore essentially meaningless; he lacks emotion and sincerity and compassion and love and oh so many things that are essential to life. Finally, all is rectified through a sort of spiritual rebirthing that can only be facilitated through death. The paradoxical nature of the story and the main character's relationships with others are brilliantly crafted and thought provoking.
    • 4/5
      Tolstoy?s ability to capture the humanity of his characters is displayed in this collection of novellas as it is in all of his work. Tolstoy?s characters practically are human, tortured with guilt and doubt, selfish, full alternatively of na?ve delight and jaded disgust, aspiring to be something more. This feeling of reality is prominent in three of the novellas: Family Happiness, The Cossacks, and Hadji Murat. The Kreutzer Sonata, on the other hand, is full of Tolstoy?s religious convictions and is basically a warning against the dangers of carnal love, even between a man and his wife. I have always loved Tolstoy?s novels, and it is always a little jarring for me to run into the deep Christianity that characterizes some of his work. Although I am not a Christian myself, I can appreciate that Tolstoy?s religious feeling is very pure and very biblically based, a completely different being from the ritual based displays of the church. This set of novellas is interesting then, it that it shows that Tolstoy was just as complicated and contradictory as his characters so often are.
    • 4/5
      Contains "How Much Land Does a Man Need?", "The Death of Ivan Ilych", and "The Kreutzer Sonata". Modern writers rarely lavish attention on describing human emotion. Tolstoy writes extensively on the agonies of a man who does not love his wife, but is still tormented by jealousy. In "The Death of Ivan Ilych", Tolstoy presents the thoughts of a dying man who questions his conventional life as a bureaucrat.