Such was the breadth of Tolstoy’s talents that he was unsurpassed in stories, essays and plays. A play about a demon who was stuck on the theft of the souls of peasants. The story itself is a story about juvenile morality, which seems so heavy that Tolstoy’s footprints should be on every page.
Alcoholism then and now caused endless quarrels, domestic violence, senseless violence, disintegration of families, and a decrease in the life expectancy of men. So, we see that Tolstoy’s message is deeply appropriate, and his strategy to convey this tale of morality for most people was to make it simple, short, with an emphasis on the destructive effect of alcohol. This is truly a moral story – and that’s good because it solves a real problem that destroys the structure of...
The main character of the story, Dmitry Olenin, is close to the author both in spiritual experience and in moral aspirations. Like Tolstoy, he finds himself in the Caucasus in an attempt to start a new life, „"in which there will be no more mistakes, there will be no remorse, and probably there will be only happiness."” But instead of imagining paintings on the way to the Caucasus in the spirit of Russian romantic literature, the hero of the story had to see real life and f...
In the play „The Living Corpse”, the famous Russian writer L.N. Tolstoy appears as a playwright. It is filled with intense psychological collisions, complex images of heroes, ambiguous and with that vitally revealed throughout the whole story. And, as always, the themes of love, kindness and human destiny are in the foreground. The play is based on real events, it was popular at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was translated into foreign languages, put on stages,...
„"Master and Man"” is the story of L. N. Tolstoy about two people caught in a terrible snowstorm. The owner throws his worker to save his life, but he himself cannot get out... Faced with death, he rethinks his life. The merchant achieved a lot. Vasily Andreevich Brekhunov: opened a shop, two taverns, a mill, several estates... And all through his tireless passion for accumulating goodness and frugality. Never missed his chance Brekhunov. And now life bodes well: sells a ne...
A young man, Richard Anson is a crewman on board Sir Francis Drake’s „Golden Hind”, which is travelling north to the coast of what will one day become British Columbia. „The Kingdom of the Sun: A Romance of the Far West Coast” (1927) is an adventure novel by Alexander Maitland Stephen (May 8, 1882 – July 1, 1942), who was a Canadian author of poetry and fiction. He began writing in the early 1920s. His first book was a volume of poetry called „The Rosary of Pan” which was p...
At the beginning of the story, walking along an incline, some of Tolstoy’s characters lie, commit robberies and even killings. The author allows his heroes to experience feelings of satisfaction and complete impunity, after they have committed terrible atrocities. Pelageyushkin, going to the massacres, is content with one own impunity. Tolstoy conducts his heroes in hellish circles: all terrible crimes are uncovered. The punishment for the crime hangs with a „Damocles sword...
When George Furnace, instructor of the Baston Aero Club, is found dead in the wreck of his crashed plane, everyone assumes it was a tragic accident, even though he was a skilled airman. An Australian visitor to the Aero Club, Edwin Marriott, Bishop of Cootamundra, suspects that the true story is more complicated. Could this be a dramatic suicide or even murder? The intrepid Bishop and Inspector Bray of Scotland Yard make an appealing pair of detectives, and ultimately a c...
The story of all-consuming passion, the story of a married woman who fell in love with a handsome officer and threw her husband against everything: the opinion of the world, generally accepted morality, her conscience. This is a much deeper work than just a story of love and suicide. This is a book about the torment of conscience, about egoism, about hypocrisy, meanness and selfishness, about the search for oneself and one’s place in this world. This is a book about life, a...
In this work, the main character is Vasily Andreevich Brekhunov, this is the owner. And the worker, a man of about fifty, named Nikita, is from a neighboring village. The relationship of the owner with the workers is one of the most difficult topics not only in literature, but also in life. Leo Tolstoy in his story describes the characters of these people, comparing them. One miser, because the author is not in vain, gave this name to Vasily Andreevich. The second hero is n...
The novel tells the story of a future world affected by an epidemic. The first part of the novel begins with a story about the youth of Lionel Verney, about his friendship with the radiant prince Adrian, the son of the abdicated king of England, about his love for the sister of Adrian Idris. Verney has a sister to Loss, with whom the proud Lord Raymond is in love. For the sake of marrying her, he refuses the hands of Idris and, for a while, from the post of Lord Protector o...
Three short stories about the everyday life of besieged Sevastopol a century and a half ago. There are no main characters as such, or rather, each participant, whether an officer or a soldier, at one point or another is in the sight of the author’s attention. It is felt that the essays were written by a participant in the events, an eyewitness. In the first part of the work, the writer introduces us to the military situation of that time, the faces of the military through a...
In the morning, men from the Kursk province arrive at the Zvezdintsev’s house. Their appearance alarms the valet Fyodor Ivanovich, he tries to send uninvited guests to the courtyard, but the maid Tanya intervenes for the walkers: the peasants are her countrymen, in addition, one of them is the father of the barman Semyon, with whom the girl intends to associate fate. When Tanya finds out that the master refuses to sign an agreement on the sale of land, a cunning plan mature...
This work is about how black stripes always alternate with white. About how a child learns his mind, for the first time experiences one of the most terrible events of his life – the death of his mother, about how he first feels one of the most beautiful and bright feelings – his first love, about how he feels affection, grief. In the first part, we begin our acquaintance with the family of Nicholas, as well as himself. Here we will see all the joyful and sad events of his c...
This work is about how black stripes always alternate with white. Oh grief. Oh happiness. On the formation of the child as a person. About the first feelings, sensations and emotions. About first love, about children’s love and just about love. About how a child learns his mind, for the first time experiences one of the most terrible events of his life – the death of his mother, about how he first feels one of the most beautiful and bright feelings – his first love, about h...
In this novel, for a change, the protagonist is a master, not students. We see events from the point of view of some boys, but it is new that readers are asked to look at things from the point of view of the teacher. Mark Ralesford is a young gentleman who has just become engaged. He is also ready to start work after graduation and travel around the world. He is accepted as a teacher and home master at a boarding school called Grandcourt, where, coincidentally, one of his s...
The narration is conducted on behalf of the boy Nikolenka. He grows up, learns to forget grievances, experiences the first adult attraction to a young woman. The teenager is trying to convince himself that the appearance of a person is secondary, and most importantly – this is the spiritual component. For people, Nikolenka prefers solitude.
„In New York with the Tucker Twins” is a sixth book in the Tucker Twins series, written by an American author of juvenile fiction and a movie censor Emma Speed Sampson and published between 1915 and 1924. Nominally it’s a boarding school series, but actually only two of the books are set at school. Our heroine is 15 year-old Page Allison, a doctor’s daughter, raised in a rural Virginia community where she has no companionship with girls her own age. On her way to school for...
The story „Father Sergius” is one of Tolstoy’s most deeply personal works. This is a story about leaving. This is her main topic, and all the more curious, that its meaning did not develop immediately, with the accumulation of some own spiritual experience, which he was in no hurry to put on paper, and even more so – to publish.
Written for young girls, this is book №4 in „The Carter Girls Series” by Emma Speed Sampson. Sampson, using the name of her sister Nell Speed, wrote 4 titles in the Molly Brown series after her sister’s death in 1913. She also wrote several volumes including the Carter Girls series and the Tucker Twins before she began publishing works under her own name. „The Carter Girls of Carter House” is a good, clean book full of the antics of a family working together to solve their ...
The very concept of „The Power of Darkness” for Tolstoy corresponds to the Gospel, where darkness is identified with the concept of hell and death, and light with hope and paradise. The Power of Darkness expresses not only religious, but also philosophical ideas of the great Russian writer. Darkness is the moral blindness of people who commit a crime in order to satisfy the most base motives. The power of „The Power of Darkness” for Tolstoy is the tragedy of hopelessness, a...
”War and Peace” is not just a classic novel, but a real heroic epic, the literary value of which is not comparable to any other work. The writer himself considered it a poem, where the private life of a person is inseparable from the history of the whole country. Events and impressions from a peaceful life do not leave characters during the war, on the contrary, they come to life more strongly in their souls. War for them is a test of the importance and significance of man....
1926. Arthur Cheney Train (1875-1945) was the former assistant district attorney in New York City. His interactions with clients, together with his experiences in the courtroom, provided the material for the more than 250 short stories and novels he would write during his lifetime. Train wrote dozens of stories about fictional lawyer Ephraim Tutt in the Saturday Evening Post. He also coauthored two science fiction novels with eminent physicist Robert W. Wood. After 1922, he...
