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The Death of Ivan Ilych, and other stories
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amazon review:
The four stories of this volume are ' The Death of Ivan Ilyich', The Kreutzer Sonata', Family Happiness','Master and Man'.
In the insightful afterword David Magarshack writes ."Poet,Calvinist, fanatic, aristocrat"- in these four words Turgenev summed up Tolstoy at the age of twenty-nine,and nothing in Tolstoy's subsequent life contradicts this shrewd characterisation. Indeed the four stories of this volume- 'Family Happiness' " The Death of Ivan Ilyich' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' and 'Master and Man' written in 1859, 1886, 1889, and 1895 respectively -quite clearly reveal these four fundamental traits of Tolstoy's character as well as the underlying motif of his writings during the first great creative period of his life, culminating in 'Anna Karenina', and the motifs of his later period when the' Calvinist and fantic' all but submerged the ' poet and the aristocrat'. The chief theme of his life work is summed up in the sentence that occurs several times in ' Family Happiness': "The only certain happiness in life is to live for others."
This theme certainly is at the center of Ivan Ilyich who at the end of his life comes to the great understanding that in living for himself alone , not even for his family , his life has been meaningless.
The reader of these stories will see how one of the world's great masters confronts fundamental questions of human existence.
The four stories of this volume are ' The Death of Ivan Ilyich', The Kreutzer Sonata', Family Happiness','Master and Man'.
In the insightful afterword David Magarshack writes ."Poet,Calvinist, fanatic, aristocrat"- in these four words Turgenev summed up Tolstoy at the age of twenty-nine,and nothing in Tolstoy's subsequent life contradicts this shrewd characterisation. Indeed the four stories of this volume- 'Family Happiness' " The Death of Ivan Ilyich' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' and 'Master and Man' written in 1859, 1886, 1889, and 1895 respectively -quite clearly reveal these four fundamental traits of Tolstoy's character as well as the underlying motif of his writings during the first great creative period of his life, culminating in 'Anna Karenina', and the motifs of his later period when the' Calvinist and fantic' all but submerged the ' poet and the aristocrat'. The chief theme of his life work is summed up in the sentence that occurs several times in ' Family Happiness': "The only certain happiness in life is to live for others."
This theme certainly is at the center of Ivan Ilyich who at the end of his life comes to the great understanding that in living for himself alone , not even for his family , his life has been meaningless.
The reader of these stories will see how one of the world's great masters confronts fundamental questions of human existence.
304 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1,1886
This edition
- Format
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304 pages, Mass Market Paperback
- Published
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February 1, 1960 by Signet Classics
- ISBN
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9780451523808
- ASIN
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0451523806
- Language
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English
About the author
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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.
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.
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