"The Kreutzer Sonata (World's Classics) - Softcover

"To love him was not enough for me after the happiness I had felt in falling in love. I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love". Leo Tolstoy, known to the world for his famous novels, also created throughout his 60-year career as a writer a significant body of works of shorter ficiton. These fictions, like his novels, tend toward a uniqueness in form, even as they explore a set of themes common in the longer works. The four novellas selected here stand closest to the novels, and represent Tolstoy at his creative best, exploring in a specific and focused way his characteristic themes: life understood as a journey of the discovery of identity and vocation, the meaning of one's life in the face of death, and the redemptive role of suffering and compassion. "Family Happiness" (1859) traces the psychology of failed married love yet is written against the tradition of the novel of romance, marriage and adultery. "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889) recounts a husband's addictions, jealousy, sinister guilt and subsequent isolation, while "The Cossacks" (1863) focuses on the experiences of a young Russian in the Caucusus, whose quest for romantic love becomes one for the love of "the whole of God's world". This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

Richard Gustafson is Professor of Russian at Barnard College, Columbia University and a specialist in Russian literature and religious philosophy. He is the author of Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (1986).