Short Stories

In the six most important short stories of L. N. Tolstoy (Kreutzer Sonata - with two additions; Devil; Father Sergei; Cholstrometer; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Walk in the Light) intertwines as if on a golden thread a sharp criticism of social and inner values of man on the one hand; and the search for a way out of the resulting, inevitable life contradiction, on the other hand. A unique appendix on the sex ratio, compiled from the diaries of L. N. Tolstoy, is the Russian thinker's response not only to the tumultuous, even outrageous, response to the opening story, Kreutzer's Sonata (published for the first time with the story and the afterword! ), but also to the thematically related "The Devil", in relation to marriage, love and the necessary direction of man towards moral purity. In the short story Father Sergei, Tolstoy brings us to the image of human ambition, talent, temptation and the mental emptiness of man, gradually moving further and further away from the goal itself: the well-being of life. In the story of the horse (Cholstoměr), the earliest story of the six presented here, the absurdity of a nanicised existence is contrasted and graduated, in the simile of horse and man. The death of Ivan Ilyich, the fifth story, is, next to the Kreutzer Sonata, probably the most tragic description of the post-everything, of artificially induced and assumed values of society in the soul of the individual, with many secondary images of his essential hypocrisy and discord. The least known work in the present eighth volume of the LNT Library is the final short story: Walk in the light. In the dialogue between Julius and Pamphilus, Tolstoy subordinates the values of this world to the moral and rational demands expressed in Christian teaching (naturally meaning not ecclesiastical! ). Perhaps that is why this unique tale has not only been held back by the Church itself, but has become too much for the ubiquitous Moloch. The published Stories are, in their entirety, a kind of fictional essence of Tolstoy's philosophical, social and religious writings, his own struggles and his acquired, rational relationship to the world. All the stories retain the character of picturesque Czech in their new, revised form.