Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy Book

ETA: I'm a little confused by the number of reviews that claim these works aren't "short" as the title indicates. Have you read War and Peace or Anna Karenina? Those are loooong. These are short.

Family Happiness (1859): A young girl falls in love with a much older man; the story follows their relationship from the start of their love, when things are always gooey-heart-shaped-eyeballs-for-each-other through their marriage, when Mashechka realizes that love and marriage isn't quite it's all cracked up to be. The Mountain Goats song by the same name took its title from the Tolstoy story and mentions Tolstoy in the song as well. (In case anyone else is nerdy about music and literary references like I am.)

Cattiness! (Page 67):
I recognized the voices: the speakers were the Italian marquis and a French friend of his whom I knew also. They were talking of me and of Lady S., and the Frenchman was comparing us as rival beauties... I was already a mother, while Lady S. was only nineteen; though I had the advantage in hair, my rival had a better figure.

The Cossacks (1852-1862): Mr. Richy-pants, Dmitri Olenin, joins the Russian army in hopes to have some adventure because that's what Richy-pant types of people tend to do to give their life some meaning. In the middle of nowhere in the Caucasus he realizes that his previous standing means zippola - hello, wake-up call. Still, he falls in love with a Cossack girl despite the glaring differences in their social standing, but he has to contend with her fiance.

What I learned: I wasn't familiar with the term abreks and had to look it up. In simple terms it seems they were your run-of-the-mill mountain bandits. In El-terms I like to think of them as Russian ninjas.

The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886): To summarize: A high-court judge (Ivan Ilych) hangs some curtains one day, falls and hurts himself, and soon thereafter believes he is dying. The moral of the story: Go with Venetian blinds. Forget the curtains.

If you think that's seriously the moral of the story you probably shouldn't be reading this review. In a nutshell, it's awesome. Please read it. All of you. It affected me in the same way reading Franny and Zooey affected me, for sort of the same reason. Which is funny because I'm not religious. At all.

(Listed on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Kick the Bucket list.)


The Devil (1889): You know a story is going to be good when it starts out with a lengthy quote from the Bible. This story is about sex and eeeeviiiiil. Basically.

More cattiness! (Page 306):It is generally supposed that Conservatives are usually old people, and that those in favour of change are the young. That is not quite correct. Usually Conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen.

The Kreutzer Sonata (1889): Girls, if you're cheating on your boyfriend/husband and you think your boyfriend/husband has an inkling as to what is happening behind his back, do not gift him a copy of The Kreutzer Sonata for Christmas.

Also, thanks to my buddy Alex for the reminder - it's extra great to read the latter portion while listening to the music.

(Listed on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Kick the Bucket list.)


Master and Man (1895): A fantastic survival-in-the-snowy-Russian-woods kind of story and not at all about this even though they both feature the name Nikita.

Father Sergius (1898): What do you do when you find out the day before your wedding that your fiancee is sleeping with the Tsar? You run off and become a monk, of course! But there's that whole temptation and doubt thing to contend with, yada yada yada. The story itself reminds me of one of the stories out of The Decameron actually, and I wonder if Tolstoy was paying homage.


(From the film based on the story, 1918.)

Hadji Murad (1904): Possibly one of the most intense stories I've ever read. It's like The Iliad but, y'know, Russian. Dude's cheek hangs off his face at one point, and he holds it in place with his hand while fighting with his other hand. Wicked crazy. I'm actually sort of speechless about this one. For some reason going into it I didn't think I'd enjoy it at all. Glad I didn't skip it. (Yeah, like I'm capable of doing that anyway.)

Alyosha the Pot (1905): I can't believe I've never read this story before considering how short and sweet it is. (Okay, not exactly sweet.) Find it online and read it. Seriously, it's short and awesome.


As a whole this collection rocked my face. I don't think there was a single story I didn't care for - even the ones I cared about less than the others are better than some other writers' entire oeuvre. What's nice about this collection is the stories/novellas are in order of publication date so you see the kind of writer Tolstoy was at the beginning and how his interests had changed over the years - particularly after his moral crisis and "conversion" in 1878.

The Chronology in the back points out the years 1908-1909 as being especially important: "Quarrels of Tolstoy with his wife. Tolstoy keeps Secret Diary." Secret Diary? I'm there! Must. Find.

I know I was pretty excited about Chekhov after reading The Portable Chekhov and all, but Tolstoy just kicked his ass.