The Louise and Aylmer Maude translations of Tolstoy's short fiction, revised by the editor for enhanced comprehension, and annotated for student readers, comprise our text. The ten short stories included, written between 1855 and 1905, have been carefully chosen by the editor as representing the best of Tolstoy's shorter work both before War and Peace and after Anna Karenina.
"The Texts of Tolstoy's Short Fiction" includes ten Tolstoy short stories: Sevastopol in December, Sevastopol in May, Three Deaths, Family Happiness, God Sees the Truth but Waits, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Three Hermits, The Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, Alyosha the Pot.
"Backgrounds and Sources" includes two Tolstoy memoirs, A History of Yesterday (1851) and The Memoirs of a Madman (1884), as well as excerpts from Tolstoy's diaries and letters that shed light on his ethos.
"Criticism" contains nineteen wide-ranging essays by both Russian and Western scholars. Included are essays by Gary Saul Morson, N. G. Chernyshevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, John Bayley, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Green, N. K. Mikhailovsky, and Donald Barthelme, among others.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
THE TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR: MICHAEL R. KATZ is Dean of Language Schools Abroad and Professor of Russian at Middlebury College. He formerly taught at Williams College and the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Literary Ballad in Early-Nineteenth-Century Literature and Dreams and the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction. In addition to Tul-stoy's Short Fiction, he has translated and edited the Norton Critical Editions of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. He has also translated Alexander Herzen's Who Is to Blame?, Dostoevsky's Devils, Druzhinin's Polinka Saks, Evgeniia Tur's Antonina, N. G. Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and Prologue, and Artsybashev's Sanin.
ABOUT THE SERIES: Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations— from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory—as well as a bibliography and, in many cases, a chronology of the author's life and work.
