By 1877 Leo Tolstoy was finished with the long-form novel: no other vast work would flow from his pen to join War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But that's not to say the great writer was content to rusticate on his estate. Instead, he spent the remaining 33 years of his life – an appropriately Christ-like period – sermonising, attempting to foment social change according to anti-establishment Christian ideals, and producing acreages of pamphlets, essays and correspondence. He also wrote some of the greatest short stories of his career.
Tolstoy translator Richard Pevear asserts 'there is no such thing as a "Tolstoy story,"' and it's certainly true to say that the folktale simplicity of Alyosha the Pot (1905) is miles apart from the suffocating psychological interiority of The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), which in turn bears little relation to the exhilarating Prisoner of the Caucasus (1872). Yet these stories are linked by what the French scholar and translator Michel Aucouturier calls Tolstoy's "gift of concrete realisation", and an ever-restless breed of philosophical inquiry – a combination that could produce works of an intensity that surprises even after repeated readings.
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