خب، روی جلد کتاب نوشته شاهکارهای کوتاه

(البته اگر "شاهکارک "هم میبود چندان جفایی نه در حق کتاب و نه در حق تولستوی نشده بود )

ابتدا که سونات کرویتسر رو خوندم به نظرم خیلی جالب اومد و بعد که مرگ‌ ایوان ایلیچ تمام شد نظرم نسبت به داستان اول تقویت شد
اما با خوندن "بابا سرگئی" هم سونات و هم مرگ ایوان ایلیچ با یک فاصله زیاد بعد از این داستان قرار گرفتند

بابا سرگئی را تا حدی می توان شیخ صنعانِ عطار قلمداد نمود
و از نگاهی دیگر و بدون هیچ گونه شعاردادن، ریا و کبر و نخوت را مانع رهایش درونی بیان می کند

:در مقدمه اثر چنین آمده
انسانی که در میان دو تلاش غیر طبیعی و یا به تعبیر صادقانه، طبیعی ترین تلاش ها! خرد و خمیر می شود

" شاید بتوان خیلی خلاصه " خام بدم پخته شدم سوختم
را در مورد کاساتسکی یا همان سرگئی عنوان نمود
یک فرمانده گارد جاه طلب و موفق که در اثر یک اتفاق ناگهان مسیر زندگی اش به کلی متحول می شود و در این مسیر به تدریج نسبت به درون خویش آگاهی می یابد
یک آگاهی هولناک
"...هرچه بیشتر تسلیم این شیوه زندگی می شد احساس می کرد که چگونه تدریجا، حقیقت باطنی به ریا و ظاهرسازی مبدل میگردد و چگونه چشمه آب حیات خشک می شود و رفته رفته کارهایی را که انجام می دهد بیشتر به خاطر مردم انجام می دهد تا به خاطر خدا
این سوالی که از آنچه انجام می دهد چه مقدارش برای خداوند و چه مقدارش برای مردم است، پیوسته رنجش می داد و هرگز نه تنها نمی توانست بلکه جرئت نداشت به آن جواب بدهد"

:و بعد با خود می گوید
" من به بهانه خداپرستی برای مردم زندگی می کردم
آیا کمترین آرزوی صادقانه برای عبادت خدا در دل من وجود داشته است؟
برای کسانی که مانند من زندگی کرده اند خدایی وجود ندارد، باید به جست و جوی خدا بردم..."


در مجموع کتاب خوبی بود و از ترجمه بسیار روان و شیوایی هم برخودار بود

سه داستان خوب
از یکی از بزرگترین داستان نویسان همیشه تاریخ
با جملات و پیامهای قابل اعتنا
آن هم با ترجمه ای دلنشین

اگرچه داستان دوم را به اندازه دو اثر دیگر از نظر محتوایی دوست نداشتم (سلیقه ای) اما در کل کتابی بود که به نظرم حتما و حتما ارزش خواندن را داشت

I've never read any Tolstoy before, and was advised that The Death of Ivan Ilyich might be a good place to start, as it is one of his more accessible novels. I have to admit I was struggling to start with with this collection of short stories, the military themes were not at all interesting to me, and I was struggling to track the characters. I'm glad I persisted though, as some of the later stories in this collection were excellent.

I think I would recommend these to a newcomer to Tolstoy, but I would probably suggest reading in a different order to that of the collection, as the first two stories were, in my opinion, significantly weaker than the rest.

The Raid
3.5/5
My first ever Tolstoy so wasn't really sure what to expect. An interesting perspective on the perceptions of bravery, and the reality of war. Didn't feel like anything entirely new or ground-breaking, but possibly was more so for its time.

The Woodfelling
3.5/5
I enjoyed getting to know the characters a bit better in this one, but it still felt like it didn't really go anywhere. I think it had some good meaning behind it, but I would have expected a bit more plot to go along with it. I think it actually suffers for being a short story rather than a full length novel. Probably the only time anyone has criticized a Tolstoy book for being too short!

Three Deaths
4.5/5
Much better than the previous, I think I'm not one for war stories. Very short but succinct. Tolstoy has an impressive ability to give characters a lot of personality in very few pages.

Polikushka
4/5
Pretty dark, but again Tolstoy's strengths in characters shines through. Very multifaceted characters who aren't good or bad.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich
4/5
Interesting story of a man looking back on his life, and coming to terms with his death. A timeless concept

After the Ball
4/5
Another pretty dark very short story. Not much to say about this one because it was so short, but enjoyable nontheless.

The Forged Coupon
4.5/5
Really great story - taking the concept of the butterfly effect to an extreme, but really cool to see this huge cast of characters with lots of linking stories.

Ivan Ilych’s life revolved around his career; as a high court judge he takes his job very seriously. However after he falls off a ladder, he soon discovers that he is going to die. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a novella that deals with the meaning of life in the face of death. A masterpiece for Leo Tolstoy written after his religious conversion in the late 1870s.

Something that was fascinating about The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the drastic change in writing style when comparing it to Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I am not just referring to the length, but that does play a big part. I have read somewhere that Tolstoy intentionally made Anna Karenina and War and Peace so long because he wanted to replicate life and the journey the characters face. Allowing the reader to experience every decision and moral dilemma that the character is facing, exploring the growth or evolution of each and every person within the novels.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich takes a more focused approach, dealing with major questions revolving around the meaning of life, death and spirituality. Leo Tolstoy had a major conversion in the late 1870s and the questions in this novel were the questions he was asking himself. Whether or not Ivan Ilyich found the answers he was looking for is up to the reader but it is believed that Leo Tolstoy was still looking for the same answers well after finishing this novella.

There is a lot of pain and torment that appears in this book, which reflects the authors search for answers and that is what really stood out for me. Not only was I reading a spiritual/existential struggle of the protagonist but Tolstoy’s own feeling really came out within the pages. This is what makes this a masterpiece that explores the tortured artist in great detail. I don’t want to say much more, this is the type of book people have to read and make their own mind up about the themes presented, but it is worth reading.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2015/...

In one of his war stories from Sevastopol, Tolstoy casually remarks that he seemed to be constantly observing ‘the familiar figures of my men who I could not help study down to their last detail.'

I think it was this overriding interest in what makes human beings tick: their beliefs, their actions, their ambitions, their fears – that made Tolstoy such a great writer. He was constantly questioning, constantly wondering what it was all about, and trying to finally figure out how to live. Both Pierre in War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina have this quest-driven element to their personalities, as do many of his secondary characters in almost all of his great novels and the central ones in most of his short stories.

Having read both volumes of his Collected Short Fiction, I’d read all the stories in this volume previously, but with Tolstoy, rereading never fails to repay one’s effort, and it is also interesting to see how the editor put together his collection. In this case, Anthony Briggs has assembled stories which relate to what he argues in his introduction represented a critical turning point in both Tolstoy’s life and his writings: an premonition of impending death which he experienced in a hotel room in the late 1860s, and which was so terrifying that he wrote his wife about it. All of the stories in this collection deal either directly or tangentially with this relatively morbid subject.

But they do so in a fundamentally moral way: for is it not one’s impending death that hones one’s efforts to make one’s life worthwhile, and prods one to answer the fundamental moral questions with which life continually confronts us?

His descriptions of nature are breathtaking, his ability to draw characters outstanding, and his ability to develop plots of engaging interest never fails. But it is his questions, and particularly his moral questions that I found most important in this rereading. For instance:

-tCan it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immense starry heavens?
-tIs it possible that man’s heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, and the desire to destroy his fellows?
-tDoes maturity essentially consist in one’s ability to accept and not fear death?
-tDoes maturity involve putting away all forms of affectation arising from one’s worries about how one is viewed by others and merely accepting oneself for what one is?
-tHow much of one’s essential existence depends on one’s choice to fall into one of the three basic types of personalities: the submissive, the domineering or the reckless?
-tIs it true that there is an indirect relationship between those who are about to die and those who care for them that it the poor among the former will be quiet and cooperative with the latter, but the well to do will have vituperation and spite in their treatment of those who surround them?
-tDoes the respect one receives from others depend on one’s essential character and skills, or more in the self confidence and bravado with which one carries oneself?
-tIs it possible for someone of weak moral fibre to change the ill-starred nature of their actions or, no matter how sincere they are in their desire to do so, will their black-sheep nature nonetheless wield influence over their fate?
-tIs money truly cursed? Is it not amazing how frequently it seems to bring misfortune rather than pleasure to those who obtain it?
-tAre all highly trained professionals, especially doctors and lawyers, essentially actors, in that they often know next to nothing about they are dealing with, but nevertheless put on well established airs and well practised mannerisms which make them appear superior?
-tShould one prefer city life since it is ‘tasteful, comfortable, clean and luxurious’ over life in the countryside which is ‘crude, cheerless, impoverished and messy’?
-tIs it true that following the principles detailed in the Gospels within the New Testament and the simple, morally uprighteous pattern of life that Jesus exemplified, is a guide which is capable of turning the vainglorious away from their self delusions, the miserly and selfish towards generosity and sympathy and even murderers into saints?
-tWas Maria Semyonova right when she advised the tailor ‘It’s better not to change, but to live in the way you’ve always lived.’

Tolstoy is one of the most comfortable writers I’ve ever read: it is a sheer relaxing delight to read his prose as he almost instinctively knows how to balance description, action and dialogue while engaging his reader. But above and beyond these attributes, it is as a moral questioner that he is truly one of the most penetrating of all writers.

Highly recommended.

My first Tolstoy.

و ما الحياة الدنيا الا متاع الغرور. أليس أكثرنا ايفان ايليتش؟ (مصرع ايفان ايليتش)

Tolstoy keeps it so damn real. He tells it as it is. He describes life and death in such an excellent way that hasn't been done by any other writers that I've read before. He talks about love with both warm intimacy and brutal honesty, and not just romantic love, but also the love for God (I really like his particular ideal of Christianity, even though I myself am of no religion.), for goodness (His stories are like moral teachings.), and for fellow humans (He reminds us this again and again in his stories).

Favorites:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - In the face of impending death, Ivan Ilyich looks back at his seemingly perfect life, learning that his whole life was indeed wrong, and finally finds redemption through the light.
The Kreutzer Sonata - Love and jealously, the dark side of marriages.
Master and Man - I cried.
The Devil - A dark story about lust, depravity, and the fall of a family man.
The Forged Coupon - Fucking genius.

Family Happiness: Well-written but trite. Still a pleasant reading experience. Such a view of marriage is very depressing though.

The Death of Ivan Ilych: Very thought-provoking, especially in the context of the literature of contemporary Russian intelligentsia. Easily the best of the bunch.

The Kreutzer Sonata: Another story where somebody is a psychologically disturbed douchebag, and tries to redeem themselves by coming up with an extensive new system of morality that justifies their actions. Personal accountabilty? What's that? My Russian History professor in college described this story as "excruciatingly painful," and I have to concur.

Master and Man: Trite again, but okay. Makes travelling the wilds of Russia in winter seem pretty intimidating, though.

Le Père Serge = Grandiose!

Got this for the title story/novella but came away more impressed/interested by the last long story, "The Forged Coupon." It's a baton passer, like Linklater's "Slacker" at first, before it settles on a handful of characters. Really loved it structurally, how it dramatized a chain of connections and consequences, and didn't mind that it introduced a rural Russian serial killer into the mix -- but since this is late Tolstoy, Stepan the Killer of course finds God, not the church but the true spirit of the Scriptures, astounding everyone how infected (Tolstoy keyword) he was by one of his victims who calmly informed him that he'd be damned by what he was about to do (cut her throat). Of all the Tolstoy stories read so far, it's this one I'll definitely re-read and study.

"After the Ball" is worth a re-read too, the story of how one night changed the narrator's life, when he witnessed a colonel's grace in one setting and soon after his cruelty in another -- it changed his life because he would've married the colonel's daughter if he hadn't witnessed the colonel's brutality and decided he was better off passing on the colonel for a father-in-law.

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is notable in part for its structure, starting with the titular character's death and then backtracking to his life, lightly mentioning the knob that bumped his side and caused some difficult to diagnose kidney damage. The story infects you with his suffering, the sense that everyone around you is aware of something they don't directly say, and it ends with a sort of luminous release into joy as he dies.

These final three stories are worth the price of admission -- doubly clear compared to "The Cossacks" thanks to the maturity of the writer and also I think the translator. I sense that Briggs errs on the side of clarity and traditional syntax in a way that makes these stories seem more like fables. Same was true with his translation of W&P.

I don't have much to say about the other stories in the collection because I didn't read them -- I'd start them, find it difficult to engage/latch on, skip to the next one, and then the next one, before I finally got to the one I'd bought the book for ("Ivan Ilyich"). I'll probably re-read the title story in a different translation at some point to compare and try to return to the first few stories at some point when I can read them while walking instead of ready for sleep in bed.

3.5⭐️ La prima storia (quella che da il titolo alla raccolta) e “Il diavolo” mi sono piaciute tantissimo. Le altre due sono molto diverse, sinceramente non mi aspettavo per niente delle storie a modi “parabola”. Non mi catturano in generale, e queste in particolare mi sono sembrate mooooolto lunghe. Però comunque si intrecciavano bene alla tematica ricorrente della brevità della vita, della difficoltà di viverne una significativa senza perdersi negli eccessi o nella routine.

What’s there to say? Tolstoy is the man