Washoe County Library System

A collection of seven critical essays discussing Tolstoy's novel, arranged in chronological order of their original publication.

These four novellas--Family Happiness, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Cossacks, and Hadji Murad--each unique in form, show Tolstoy at his creative height. This edition uses the acclaimed Maude translations, (except forFamily Happiness, translated by J.D. Huff), modernized and corrected against modern Russian editions to create this English language version. While the Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata appears for the first time in English with the story....

"In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches...

"Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel. Critic and professor Bob Blaisdell unravels Tolstoy's family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna Karenina. In the process, we see where...