Hadji Murad and other stories (riverrun editions)

Tolstoy's shorter fiction, the third volume of his works, focuses on his later stories, such as Hadji Murad. In these works, life has no rational meaning, as seen in the chain of events following two schoolboys' deception in The Forged Coupon and the disillusionment of the narrator in After the Ball. The riverrun edition reissues the translation of Louise and Aylmer Maude, who first brought Tolstoy's work to a wide readership in English.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 17 March 2022
Publisher: Quercus Publishing

One of the joys of Tolstoy's stories is how truth grows and deepens when it moves from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening. Sharon Cameron, in her preface to Hadji Murad and Other Stories, This, the third volume of Tolstoy's shorter fiction, focuses on his later stories, including one of his greatest, Hadji Murad. In the stark form of homily that shapes these later works, life considered as one's own has no rational meaning. From the chain of events that follows in the wake of two schoolboys' deception in The Forged Coupon to the disillusionment of the narrator in After the Ball, we see, in Virginia Woolf's observation, that Tolstoy puts at the center of his writing one who gathers into himself all experience, turns the world round between his fingers, and never ceases to ask, even as he enjoys it, what is the meaning of it.

The 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.

Weight: 314g
Dimension: 130 x 199 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529410556