Although Tolstoy's fame rests on his novels, he was also a prolific dramatist. Because his plays are satirical, didactic, and colored by complex peasant dialect, earlier translations have been seriously flawed. Now noted Slavic philologist Marvin Kantor and Tatiana Tulchinsky have prepared the first complete English translation of the great writer's plays.
"Tolstoy: Plays, Volume 2 "offers two long plays written during the years 1886-89. "The Realm of Darkness" is Tolstoy's best-known play, a treatment of moral issues within a community of Russian peasants. The lesser known "The Fruits of...

A collection of translated plays from Tolstoy.

Although Tolstoy's fame rests on his novels, he was also a prolific dramatist. Because his plays are satirical, didactic, and colored by complex peasant dialect, earlier translations have been seriously flawed. These imperfect translations, coupled with Tolstoy's famous polemics against Shakespeare and Chekhov, have reinforced the general misapprehension that Tolstoy was not a dramatist.
Now noted Slavic philologist Marvin Kantor and Tatiana Tulchinsky have prepared the first complete English translation of the great writer's plays. This volume contains plays written during the years 1894...

Drawing on the tragic past of Russia and its empire to comment on the issues and ideas of his day, Leo Tolstoy wrote the stories in "Divine and Human and Other Stories "during the chaos surrounding the 1905 revolution. These stories, presented together for the first time, show the depth of, and contradictions in, Tolstoy's thought as he tried to reconcile his harsh religious beliefs with humanist appeals for justice. Taken as a whole, the collection is a revealing look at the complex life and thought of a literary giant.

"In the Days of Serfdom" and Other Stories, originally published in 1911, presents in miniature themes developed in Tolstoy's longer works War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The compelling stories in this collection have largely been ignored by contemporary scholars and teachers because of their general unavailability. Available once again, the stories reveal new thematic and stylisitic dimensions to Tolstoy's oeuvre. While not all of the stories deal with actual serfdom, they all address the legacy of serfdom, of choicelessness, in Tolstoy's Russia. These stories are also...

In 1851 Leo Tolstoy enlisted in the Russian army and was sent to the Caucasus to help defeat the Chechens. During this war a great Avar chieftain, Hadji Murad, broke with the Chechen leader Shamil and fled to the Russians for safety. Months later, while attempting to rescue his family from Shamil's prison, Hadji Murad was pursued by those he had betrayed and, after fighting the most heroic battle of his life, was killed.
Tolstoy, witness to many of the events leading to Hadji Murad's death, set down this story with painstaking accuracy to preserve for future generations the horror,...

In the years before he wrote War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy founded and ran a school on his estate at Yasanya Polyana. Brimming with progressive and sometimes radical ideas on schooling, Tolstoy undertook to teach the peasant children many subjects-including imaginative writing-and wrote about what he learned. This is a book for anyone who cares about education.