Hadji Murad and other stories (riverrun editions)

‘How truth thickens and deepens when it migrates from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening is one of the thrills of Tolstoy’s stories’

This, the third volume of Tolstoy’s shorter fiction concentrates on his later stories, including one of his greatest, ‘Hadji Murad’. In the stark form of homily that shapes these later works, life considered as one’s own has no rational meaning. From the chain of events that follows in the wake of two schoolboys’ deception in ‘T…