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The violent spiritual crisis in Tolstoy’s life that inspired his last period of creativity produced the stories in this compelling and startling collection. This volume includes “Family Happiness”; “The Kreutzer Sonata”; “The Devil” and “Father Sergius”. The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. They portray the multifaceted nature of desire, from idealistic romance to sexual jealousy, from desperate lust to relentless longing. “The Kreutzer Sonata” caused a public sensation with its indictment of so-called Christian marriage, a theme echoed in “Family Happiness.” Tolstoy knows that his readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the approval and even worship of others – Tolstoy depends on our own memories to entangle us in his tragic stories. In these four stories, Tolstoy 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 nature of love in “The Kruetzer Sonata”, a novella banned for its scandalous content in 1890. In “The Devil”, a young man finds it impossible to resist a beautiful peasant woman with whom he had an affair before his marriage, while “Father Sergius” shows a man going to increasingly desperate ends – from a soldier to monk, to hermit to beggar – in order to avoid the temptations of the flesh. The translations by David McDuff and Paul Foote faithfully convey Tolstoy’s candid, vigorous prose. This edition also includes a new introduction by Donna Orwin discussing Tolstoy’s depiction of love and sex in these works, as well as a chronology, further reading and notes.

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