‘How truth thickens and deepens when it migrates from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening is one of the thrills of Tolstoy’s stories’

Sharon Cameron in her preface to The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

This second volume of Tolstoy’s shorter fiction, selected by the critic Sharon Cameron, contains ‘Family Happiness’, ‘The Devil’ and ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, three of Tolstoy’s unhappy-marriage stories as well as ‘Father Sergius’, a story of a loss of identity in ambitious pursuit of holy virtue and ‘Master and Man’. Tolstoy’s antidotes to delusion, fear, jealousy and even madness have an ethical thread pulled through the fabric of different themes and genres.

This riverrun edition reissues the translation of Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose influential versions of Tolstoy first brought his work to a wide readership in English.