The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories (Wordsworth Classics)

Tolstoy, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840224533 ISBN 13: 9781840224535

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 2004

This Wordsworth Edition includes an exclusive Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B.Cook.

COUNT LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time.

In the early story Family Happiness, Tolstoy explores courtship and marriage from the point of view of a young wife. In The Kreutzer Sonata he gives us a terrifying study of marital breakdown, in The Devil a powerful depiction of the power of sexual temptation, and, in perhaps the finest of all, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he portrays the long agony of a man gradually coming to terms with his own mortality.

This volume also includes an Introduction and Notes written specially for this Wordsworth edition by Dr Tim Cook, formely lecturer in literature at the Universities of Kingston and Ulster. Previous work contributed by Dr Cook for Wordsworth includes an introduction and notes to Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby.

Book Description:

A stunning new translation of Tolstoy's late fiction, from the award-winning team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

From the Back Cover:

FROM THE AWARD-WINNING TRANSLATORS OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT AND WAR AND PEACE

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy's late fiction and the first major fictional work to be published by the author after his crisis and conversion to Christianity. The story of the life and death at the age of forty-five, of a high court prosecutor in 19th-century Russia, it is an intense and moving examination of loss and the possibilities of redemption, in which Tolstoy explores the dichotomy between the artificial and the authentic life.The nine other stories in this new collection include 'Hadji Murat' which has been described by Harold Bloom as 'the best story in the world' and 'The Devil', a tale of sexual obsession based on Tolstoy's own relationship with a married peasant woman on his estate in the years before his marriage.

Magnificently translated by the acclaimed translating team behind War and Peace, this new volume captures the richness and immediacy of Tolstoy's language and reveals the author as a passionate moral guide, an unflinching seeker of truth, and a creator of enduring and universal art.

'Tolstoy's prose is majestic, his pace measured, his characters unflinchingly true to life, his message bleak' Guardian