"In these four stories, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) depicts desire in its different manifestations--from idealistic romance to sexual jealousy, from desperate lust to relentless longing. 'Family Happiness,' an early work, portrays the struggles of a couple as they move from courtship and passion through disillusionment to the quieter stage of married love. A passenger tells a bitter tale of sex, suspicion and murder when strangers on a train discuss the...

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose. Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him,...

Many of his tales and novels are included in this book.

As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit, reveal glorious and unexpected reserves of courage, or baseness of a near inhuman kind. Two vivid parables and "The Forged Coupon", a tale of criminality, explore class relations after the emancipation of the...

As an unusual illness plagues Russian public official Ivan Ilyich, his life is forever changed as he deals with doctors who cannot diagnose or treat him, as well as a certain death sentence.

With a career spanning almost half a century, Leo Tolstoy penned down some of the worlds greatest and most celebrated works. This edition brings for you his thirty-five best short stories ranging from stories for children, stories for the people, and Russian folk tales to his adaptations from French stories and the ones written for the Jewish pogrom victims in Russia.