The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

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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.

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