The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) caused a sensation when it appeared, with its brutal narrator confessing to the murder of his wife in a monologue that tears apart bourgeois marriage and sexual morality. Tolstoy’s own wife, Sonya, wrote a counter-story in response. Visceral, disturbing, and impossible to dismiss, it remains one of his most provocative shorter works.
The additional stories in this collection display other facets of Tolstoy’s late fiction. Download the free EPUB to read some of the most searing short prose in the Russian literary tradition.