Leo Tolstoy
1) Childhood
2) What Is Art?
5) Boyhood
6) A Confession
Leo Tolstoy wrote this short meditation on sadness and the meaning of life when he was middle aged. He had already completed his masterworks, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, reared fourteen children, and gained fame and acclaim in Russia as a man of letters. But despite having attained
...7) Youth
The Kreutzer Sonata is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, named after Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. The novella was published in 1889, and was promptly censored by the Russian authorities. The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were
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