Rated as the greatest fiction writer of all time by some, Leo Tolstoy ‘s best-known works were War and Peace and Anna Karenina. However, the Russian author (1828-1910) also wrote a number of captivating novellas and short stories, a number of which are collected in this 272-page collection, just published.
The book opens with The Kreutzer Sonata itself, a 105-page novella set entirely on a lengthy train journey by night, which was first published in 1890. So incendiary was it perceived to be, that the work was forbidden by the Russian censors and banned for years in the USA. After the other passengers in a carriage have disembarked and a measure of intimacy has been achieved, Pozdnyshev begins to tell his younger fellow passenger - the narrator of the piece - the story of how he ended up killing his wife, who was also the mother of their two boys. The Kreutzer Sonata is an unashamed excuse for Tolstoy to air a welter of ideas about marriage and sexual relations.
“Women are like empresses, keeping ninety per cent of mankind in servitude and hard labour, “ declares the wife-killer, whose term of imprisonment seems to have been relatively short. “And all because they’ve been humiliated and deprived of equal rights by men.” The author’s afterword to the novella is also presented, which show him to be endorsing a sort of prudery within marriage which is utterly unrealistic.However, he may just be playing devil’s advocate, or agent provocateur - it is hard to tell when one is reading the treatise in Roger Cockrell's translation, with no knowledge certainly on this reviewer's part of the nuances of verbal expression in Russian.
The collection also includes the brilliant story, After the Ball. A former officer, Ivan Vasileyvich recalls many years later the corrosive disillusionment which ruined overnight his love affair with the 18-year old Varenka who repeatedly chooses him as dance partner at a glittering ball. The protagonist finds that he cannot look at her in the same light after discovering that her father, an elderly colonel - who was the soul of charm at the ball - could pitilessly preside over the harsh punishment of a Tatar deserter the following day.
A Prisoner of the Caucasus is, on one level at least, an engaging tale of derring do,about a soldier’s attempts to escape imprisonment from a Tatar band in the mountains of that name. However, for many readers, Master and Man will be the most enthralling tale. The rather smug, avaricious merchant, Bekhunov undergoes a Damascene conversion through the sheer demands of trying to keep himself alive after he and his servant, Nikita, are left stranded in a snowstorm.
One can only imagine the story's great, lyrical power in the original Russian, but in Roger Cockrell's fluid rendering in English, the story shines and glimmers beautifully.
Paddy Kehoe
