Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕
Description
While perhaps best known for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the Russian author and religious thinker Leo Tolstoy was also a prolific author of short fiction. This Standard Ebooks production compiles all of Tolstoy’s short stories and novellas written from 1852 up to his death, arranged in order of their original publication.
The stories in this collection vary enormously in size and scope, from short, page-length fables composed for the education of schoolchildren, to full novellas like “Family Happiness.” Readers who are familiar with Tolstoy’s life and religious experiences—as detailed, for example, in his spiritual memoir A Confession—may be able to trace the events of Tolstoy’s life through the changing subjects of these stories. Some early stories, like “The Raid” and the “Sevastopol” sketches, draw from Tolstoy’s experiences in the Caucasian War and the Crimean War when he served in the Imperial Russian Army, while other early stories like “Recollections of a Scorer” and “Two Hussars” reflect Tolstoy’s personal struggle with gambling addiction.
Later stories in the collection, written during and after Tolstoy’s 1870s conversion to Christian anarcho-pacifism (a spiritual and religious philosophy described in detail in his treatise The Kingdom of God is Within You), frequently reflect either Tolstoy’s own experiences in spiritual struggle (e.g. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch”) or his interpretation of the New Testament (e.g. “The Forged Coupon”), or both. Many later stories, like “Three Questions” and “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” are explicitly didactic in nature and are addressed to a popular audience to promote his religious ideals and views on social and economic justice.
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- Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Only very occasionally you heard the clang of a heavy gun, the sound of bayonets striking together, hushed voices, or the snorting of a horse. Nature seemed to breathe with pacifying beauty and power. Can it be that there is not room for all men on this beautiful earth, under those immeasurable starry heavens? Can it be possible that in the midst of this entrancing Nature, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the passion for exterminating their fellows, can endure in the souls of men? All that is unkind in the hearts of men, ought, one would think, to vanish at the touch of Nature: that most direct expression of beauty and goodness.
VIIWe had been riding for more than two hours. I was beginning to shiver and feel drowsy. Through the gloom I still seemed to see the same indefinite forms; a little way in front, the same black wall and the moving spots. Close in front of me I saw the crupper of a white horse which swung its tail and threw its hind legs far apart; the back of a white Circassian coat, on which could be discerned a musket in a black case, and the glimmering butt of a pistol in an embroidered sheath; the glow of a cigarette illumined a fair moustache, a beaver collar, and a white chamois glove. Every now and then, I leant over my horse’s neck, shutting my eyes, and forgetting myself for a few minutes; then, startled by the familiar tramping and rustling, I glanced round, and felt as if I were standing still, and the black wall in front was moving towards me, or that it had stopped and I should in a moment ride into it. At one such moment the rumbling which increased and seemed to approach, and the cause of which I could not guess, struck me forcibly: it was the sound of water. We were entering a deep gorge and approaching a mountain-stream that was overflowing its banks. The rumbling increased, the damp grass grew thicker and taller and the bushes closer, while the horizon gradually narrowed. Now and then, here and there against the dark background of the hills, bright lights flashed and instantly vanished.
“Tell me, please, what are those lights?” I inquired, in a whisper, of a Tartar riding beside me.
“What, don’t you know?” he replied.
“I don’t.”
“It’s the hillsmen have tied straw to poles and are waving the lights about.”
“Why are they doing it?”
“So that everyone should know the Russians have come. Oh! oh! what a bustle is going on now in the aouls; everybody’s dragging his belongings into the ravine,” he said, laughing.
“Why, do they already know in the mountains that a detachment is on its way?” I asked him.
“Eh, how can one help knowing? They always know; our people are like that.”
“Then Shamil3 too is preparing for action?” I asked.
“No,” he answered, shaking his head, “Shamil won’t go into action; Shamil will send his naibs,4 and he himself will look on through a telescope from above.”
“Does he live far away?”
“Not far. To the left, some eight miles.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “Have you been there?”
“I have; our people have all been.”
“Have you seen Shamil?”
“Eh! such as we don’t see Shamil! There are a hundred, three hundred, a thousand murids, all round him, and Shamil’s in the centre,” he said, with an expression of servile admiration.
Looking up, it was possible to discern that the sky, now cleared, was beginning to grow lighter in the East, and the Pleiades to sink towards the horizon; but the ravine through which we were marching was still damp and gloomy.
Suddenly, a little way in front of us, several lights flashed through the darkness; at the same moment some whizzing bullets flew past, and shots and piercing cries resounded amid the surrounding silence. It was the enemy’s advanced picket. The Tartars that composed it raised a hue and cry, fired at random, and then ran in different directions.
All became silent again. The General called up an interpreter. A Tartar in a white Circassian coat rode up to him and, gesticulating and whispering, talked with him for a while.
“Colonel Hasanov! Order the cordon to take open order,” commanded the
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