Divine and Human stands apart as both a landmark in literary history and master-piece of spiritual and ethical reflection. Suppressed in turn by the tzarist and Soviet regime, the tales contained in this book have, for the most part, never been published in English until now. Emerging at last, they offer western readers fresh glimpses of novelist and philosopher Leo Tolstoy. Divine and Human consists of choice selections from The Sunday Reading Stories, the second volume in a two-part work titled The Circle of Reading. In the words of translator Peter Sekirin, "Tolstoy considered The Circle...

This is the first-ever English-language edition of the book Leo Tolstoy considered to be his most important contribution to humanity, the work of his life's last years. Widely read in prerevolutionary Russia, banned and forgotten under Communism; and recently rediscovered to great excitement, A Calendar of Wisdom is a day-by-day guide that illuminates the path of a life worth living with a brightness undimmed by time. Unjustly censored for nearly a century, it deserves to be placed with the few books in our history that will never cease teaching us the essence of what is important in...

Throughout his life, Leo Tolstoy demonstrated a fascination for Americans, a feeling that was avidly reciprocated in the United States. Although Tolstoy was never able to come to America, during his lifetime he was visited at his home in Russia by a number of Americans including writers, journalists, ambassadors, professors and tourists. Many wrote about the conversations they had with the great Russian novelist. This volume gathers together 30 recollections of such conversations, all originally published in periodicals from 1887 through 1923. A brief introduction to each piece introduces the...

This revelatory documentary biography of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the world's best playwrights, consists of over 100 memories of Chekhov's close friends, family and colleague writers and artists, such as Ivan Bunin, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Maxim Gorky. Utilizing material from the archives and rare periodicals from the 1900s-1930s, the biography addresses his affairs with female admirers, his passions and hobbies, his visits to shelters for the homeless, his support of aspiring writers, as well as his advice to theater directors, actors and writers. A complement to the wealth of...