My exposure to Russian writers until a year ago was limited to Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky which I found to be painfully slow and grossly dark. Recently our book club read Fathers and Sons by Turgenev which was pretty good and gave me a little more hope. So I decided to finally pick up the short works of Tolstoy off my shelf expecting something somewhere in between Turgenev and Dostoevsky but instead was absolutely delighted to find a master at work with his own unique style. "Cossacks", "Master and Man", and "Hadji Murad" were among some of the best novellas I have read although I enjoyed all the stories in this volume. The imagery is absolutely on key for the stories I named and though there is often a moral touch it is never over done. I wish I could express myself more clearly, but if all the stories had been of the caliber of the above then this book would have easily been 5 stars. Check it out if you have the time--I don't think you will be disappointed.

Read in college, I believed that Tolstoy was the world's greatest writer. I've since changed my mind, but I really lost sleep over pondering these stories.

Pretty much, if you've read one of these stories, you've read them all. That's for the sweeping, underlying ideas: Tolstoy seems to have contempt for the French-speaking petit bourgeoise, the Russian Orthodox church, the medical profession, and, possibly, women. Any of these works (short works, NOT short stories) will give you a sense of the country before the revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, getting a sense of why there was a revolution would be a good reason to read these works.

The individuals in these works are unhappy, pretty much in the same way, despite what Tolstoy said in the opening of Anna Karenina. All of them are self-absorbed and in search of happiness. Tolstoy seems to have the idea that they--and, presumably, by extention, we--would be a whole lot more content in life if they would just get busy and do good works. You know, stop studying our navels in search of Truth. Well, thank you very much for that insight, Leo.

I'd read them for the details and the characters. Tolstoy has observed his fellow travelers in this world well and can show you how they tick. He understands envy, pride, even ambition and gives us very human people full of foibles. Unfortunately for the modern American reader, he also tends to present women as temptresses. ("It wasn't me: she made me do it.") Seemingly, men are helpless idiots in his world. I am unable to tell if this is what Tolstoy believed or simply how he feels women are viewed in nineteenth century Russia.

You may find that Tolstoy sometimes does go on. And on. And on. Constant readers may not mind this. Others should stick to movies based on his works.

This review is of the stories "Father Sergius", "The Devil", and "Alyosha the Pot". I'd read the other stories before in a separate collection which is also on a bookshelf here on goodreads. Of those stories, "The Cossacks", "The Kreutzer Sonata", and "Master and Man" rank among my favorite stories of all time both for enjoyment of the content as well as appreciation for their artistic boldness and creativity. Of the stories being reviewed here, "The Devil" and "Alyosha the Pot" were the better two of the three, particularly the latter in its almost Hemingway-esque brevity and subtle suggestiveness. It's only 5 pages long where a "short work" of Tolstoy can be anywhere from 50-200 pages. Yet, it was almost as profound as "The Devil" which, in spite of some of its long-windedness packs a philosophical punch at the end that leaves the reader dazed for at least a quarter of an hour, if not more. "Father Sergius" was a tad too moralistically sentimental for my taste: Tolstoy falls too often in the 19th century (although the story was written at the tail-end of it) trap of long-winded explanation as opposed to artistic demonstration. Yet, as dated as Tolstoy's style can be (speaking now of his writing as a whole), his ideas and insights are as fresh as if you'd thought them yesterday.

Easy to swallow than many of his novels.

- The Death of Ivan Ilyich: 5/5. Everyone should read this. Tempus Fugit. Memento Mori.
- Family Happiness: 4/5. What happens when the honeymoon phase is over? Tolstoy offers his predictions.
- The Cossacks: 1/5. Boring. Didn’t really seem to have a point.
- The Devil: 3/5. He needs to read Theology of the Body. Too bad Tolstoy lived before JPII.
- The Kreutzer Sonata: 3/5. What happens when desire turns into resentment? “‘All I’ve ever learned from love is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.’ - Pentatonix” - Leo Tolstoy
- Master and Man: 4/5. Quite a lovely story.
- Father Sergius: 3/5. Interesting thought experiment.
- Alyosha the Pot: 4/5. I had no idea you could write such a moving story in 7 pages.

Weighted Average: 3.1/5 Stars

Many aspects of life – career, love and marriage, doctors and medicine, social power and status – fall short of their ideals. Our surface-level life might feature a high-status career, a marriage and family, access to top-flight medical care, and a wide circle of friends. Surrounded by these rich relationships we believe we are loved, protected, understood and that our lives are meaningful. Tolstoy reveals a darker truth: people are rarely capable of transcending their own egos to truly understand and love another. In adversity we find ourselves alone.

Some of Tolstoy’s characters try to escape their egos in drastic ways, only to find the ego is not a thing easily shed. For others a crisis or tragedy disrupts their happy existence, making them realize – often too late – the emptiness of the life they led.

Family happiness:
Marya Alexandrovna (“Masha”), a young girl of 17, falls in love with a much older man of 36. The couple settles into married life in the countryside and Masha conceives a child, but boredom soon sets in. Seeking excitement, they travel to St. Petersburg where Masha is praised and fawned over by high society. Masha’s husband is less-than-thrilled, and their marriage is strained. When an even younger and prettier girl arrives on the scene, Masha is cast aside. Beneath the veneer of propriety, warmth and concern, society is revealed as shallow and callous.

The Death of Ivan Illych:
Ivan has a seemingly perfect life: he studies law, marries well, has children, ascends to successively higher positions and income, and acquires in the right order all the trappings of a successful life. Yet when he develops a pain in his side that gets progressively worse, he is prompted to take stock of his life.

Finding himself truly alone in confronting death, he discovers with horror that his whole life has been lived wrong.

Neither his colleagues and bridge-playing friends, nor the celebrated doctors called upon to treat him, nor even his wife and daughter, are capable of any true feeling or compassion. They are preoccupied with their own affairs, exactly as Ivan had formerly been with his own.

Ivan is everywhere meeting people who inquire after his health saying the proper things but only barely concealing their indifference. They are not him; his pain and suffering are not theirs, and his growing awareness that he will soon die does not prompt them to give a second thought to their own mortality.

“The syllogism… ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal’ has always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself”.

Ivan is consoled only by his simple servant Gerasim, who alone is selfless and sincere in his feelings of compassion.

This story was my favorite from the collection. Keeping our death in mind, skipping ahead to the end, is a valuable lens to evaluate the worth of our lives.

The Cossacks:
In this story Tolstoy shows us his ideal of a good life but also the futility of realizing it.
Dimitri Olenin, born into privilege and wealth, abandons the easy life that awaits him, instead accepting a posting in the remote and mountainous Caucasus. He falls in love with the landscape, with the simple and natural way the Cossacks live, and with a girl called Maryanka.

“It came quite naturally to him to wake up at daybreak. After drinking tea and admiring from his porch the mountains, the morning, and Maryanka, he would put on a tattered ox-hide coat, sandals of soaked raw hide, buckle on a dagger, take a gun, put cigarettes and some lunch in a little bag, call his dog, and soon after five o’clock would start for the forest beyond the village”.

“The people live as nature lives: they die, are born, unite, and more are born – they fight, eat and drink, rejoice and die, without any restrictions but those that nature imposes on sun and grass, on animal and tree. They have no other laws”.

While captivated by the Cossack way of life, Olenin realizes that happiness lies in a life of love and self-sacrifice.

Olenin tries to live as such and gives an expensive horse to a Cossack as an act of altruism, but his gift is met with suspicion instead of gratitude. Alas, life among the Cossacks is not as easy as he imagined. Olenin is caught between two worlds: the one he left behind no longer fits him, while the Cossack world remains enigmatic and not fully habitable.

Despite his longing to leave behind his former world, Olenin is too self-aware and burdened with consciousness to bridge the unbridgeable divide between himself and Cossack people.

The Devil
This story is about a man, Eugene Ivanich, who settles down to married life with his wife Liza. Eugene, however, is horrified that his dark past will upend the life he hopes to have. Before marrying Liza, Eugene carried on an affair with Stepandidia, a peasant in the village whose husband worked in a nearby town. Eugene is terrified Liza will discover his past and, more alarming still, that his ongoing desire for Stepandida cannot be contained.

The story continues with the theme that one cannot escape from oneself. Our past shapes us and follows us around.

The Kreutzer Sonata
In this story a man consumed by jealously and hatred of his wife, whom he believes has been unfaithful, decides to murder her.

Over the course of a long train ride, the man argues that love and marriage are a sham; they create the illusion of a spiritual bond when in fact there is only short-lived sexual desire.

“…in theory love is something ideal and exalted, but in practice it is something abominable, swinish, which is horrid and shameful to mention or remember”.

“A woman…. knows very well that all the talk about elevated subjects is just talk, but that what a man wants is her body and all that presents it in the most deceptive but alluring light; and she acts accordingly”.

While the man’s views about love and marriage are reductionist, the points he makes are eerily familiar to anyone who has had a longish relationship. The initial infatuation with a new lover inevitably passes and irritations and annoyances creep in. Children, when they arrive, need constant attention and plague us with worry, adding further strain to the relationship.

Yet a spiritual bond often does form, and persist, within and throughout a marriage. I’m unsure whether Tolstoy experienced the bad edge of a relationship or merely imagines what it must be like. Either which way, the story will make you reflect on the meaning of love and marriage.

Master and Man
A merchant, Vasili Andreevich, and his servant Nikita are caught unawares in a snowstorm. As nothing can been seen ahead, they are forced to stop their horse and wait out the storm. But they cannot survive long and will soon die of exposure.

This story reminds me of “the Death of Ivan Ilych”. For Vasili, as for Ivan, the prospect of imminent death causes him to take the retrospective and alter his judgment of what is important or worthwhile.

“And he remembered his money, his shop, his house, the buying and selling, and Mironov’s millions, and it was hard for him to understand why that man, called Vasili Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all those things with which he had been troubled”.

The servant Nikita is like the Gerasim character in Ivan Ilych: a simple, loyal peasant who is at peace and unburdened by pretense or fear.

“Nikita had not stirred. Like all those who live in touch with nature and have known want, he was patient and could wait for hours, even days, without growing restless or irritable”.

“The thought that he might, and very probably would, die that night occurred to him, but did not seem particularly unpleasant or dreadful.”

In the end Vasili lays on top of Nikita in the snow, a final act of selfless love that saves his servant’s life.

“He remembered that Nikita was lying under him and that he had got warm and was alive, and it seemed to him that he was Nikita and Nikita was he, and that his life was not in himself but in Nikita”.

Vasili therefore does transcend his ego and experience spiritual harmony, but ominously only in death.

Father Sergius
This story is a parable on the nature of ambition and pride and is my second favorite in the collection.

As a boy success comes easily to Stepan Kasatsky. He directs his immense talents and ambition toward accumulating accomplishments and ascending the ranks of the Russian military service.

“Apart from his main vocation, which was the services of his Tsar and the fatherland, he always set himself some particular aim, and however unimportant it was, devoted himself completely to it and lived for it until it was accomplished. And as soon as it was attained another aim would immediately present itself, replacing its predecessor. This passion for distinguishing himself, or for accomplishing something in order to distinguish himself, filled his life”.

When Katatsky discovers his fiancé had been a lover of the Tsar, his worldview is shattered. He decides to reject all things that other people care about and that had formerly concerned him. Renouncing all worldly desires, he becomes a monk.

He adjusts easily to an ascetic life, to the discipline, prayer and solitude that characterize monk-hood. His only source of suffering is his strong desire for the female body.

“Why does the whole world, with all its delights, exist if it is sinful and must be renounced? Why hast thou created this temptation?”

When a young woman travels to his solitary cell with the intent of seducing him, he is so overcome by desire that he chops off his own finger with an axe in order to resist her. He tells her:

“Dear sister, why did you wish to ruin your immortal soul? Temptations must come into the world, but woe to him by who temptation comes. Pray that God may forgive us!”

The incident inspires the woman to renounce her former life and become a nun. Rumours soon abound that Kasatsky has the power to cure people of any disease or ailment, and swarms of people seek him out.

A change comes over Kasatsky. He starts to believe that he really can perform miracles, and his life once again becomes centered around accomplishment; this time the healing of all the people who ask to be cured.

At this point Kasatsky breaks down and realizes he has failed himself and allowed his ego to reign once again.

“In how far is what I do for God and in how far is it for men? That was the question that insistently tormented him and to which he was not so much unable to give himself an answer as unable to face the answer”.

In his final fall, Kasatsky yields to his lust and sleeps with a young woman who sought his healing powers.

After this Kasatsky can longer maintain the charade of his life. Guided by a dream in which he recalls a childhood friend, Pashenka, he clothes himself as a beggar and seeks her out.

Pashenka is herself almost destitute, but nonetheless welcomes the unrecognizable Kasatsky with love and charity. Overcome, Kasatksy opens his heart to her:

“Pashenka, please listen to what I am going to tell you as to a confession made to God at my last hour. Pashenka, I am not a holy man, I am not even as good as a simple man; I am a loathsome, vile, and proud sinner who has gone astray, and who, if not worse than everyone else, is at least worse than most very bad people.

Perhaps you exaggerate, Stiva?

No, Pashenka. I am an adulterer, a murderer, a blasphemer, and a deceiver”.

Kasatsky thinks:
“So that is what my dream meant! Pashenka is what I ought to have been but failed to be. I lived for men on the pretext of living for God, while she lives for God imagining that she lives for men.”

Throughout his life Kasatsky sought respite from his ego. He sought to squash his pride and hoped that the life of a monk would provide such an escape.

Like the Tolstoy characters in the other stories, Kasatsky is dismayed to discover that the demons that plagued him in his early life were always inside him and would not die.

Alyosha the Pot
This is a very short tale about a Christlike character, Alyosha, who devotes himself entirely to others, never giving a second thought to himself or his needs. Everyone around him treats him as a slave except for a servant girl, Ustinja, with whom he falls in love. Sadly, the family he serves forbid the union, and he accepts this decree with the same cheerful attitude.

Alyosha finally dies while at work. Even on his deathbed he never strays from his calm and selfless way of being.

Alyosha has no ego at all and is therefore opposite of the characters in the other stories whose egos bring about their suffering and demise.

NOTE: I did not review Hadji Murad which I’ve noticed is the favorite story of many reviewers of this collection. I enjoyed this story but decided to leave it out of my review as it is so different from the others in its theme.

Excellent.

Every one of the stories is unique and yet so inspiring!

Referring strictly to this particular edition: I speak only a lazy variation of the English language, so when I can tell that a translation is bad something is seriously wrong. I read only "Hadji Murad" and "The Cossacks". The stories themselves were strong enough to shine through, but the wording and syntax was so awkward that I just put the book down and decided to find better translations of the rest.

Absolutely great anthology. Master and Man and Hadji Murad are two of the greatest short stories of all time.

Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (Perennial Classics) by Leo Tolstoy (2004)