"The Kreutzer Sonata" portrays an intense conflict between sexual desire and moral constraint. "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" is a simple, moving tale of peasant life with a moral lesson; the hero of "The Death of Ivan Ilych," after a lifetime of struggle, finds faith and love only as he faces death. Explanatory footnotes.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Classic and Simple...:
I purchased this book of short stories due to it's reference in Into the Wild and it helped me better connect with the main character. "How much land does a man need?", "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", and "The Kreutzer Sonata" are the three stories included and Sonata was by far my favorite. It allows you do identify with the struggles that are occurring in the story.
Three stories of despair:
The highlight of this book for me had to be re-reading "The Death of Ivan Ilych" again after all these years. I read it for the first time years and years ago as required reading in middle school and this is the first time that I have come back to it since that time. I found myself unsurprisingly better equipped to read and appreciate this story now and was exceptionally pleased to have read it again. This edition contains three short stories that were written after Tolstoy made his conversion to... more info
A Searing Read...:
and should be required for married couples to read together. It should make for some fascinating conversation.
Tolstoy adopts a scorched-earth policy in this novel which deflates the "sanctity" of marriage. The protagonist is a man on the edge, and it seems Tolstoy was there with him in the writing of this incandescent novella.
Chris McCandless, the ill-fated Alaskan voyager who died in a hunting shelter while trying to escape the ties of civilization, was reading this novel very close to his death.... more info
The hollowness of modern life:
This little book contains three short stories: "How much land does a man need?", "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", and "The Kreutzer sonata". Although the stories are widely different, they share a common theme. All three expose the hollowness of modern life, with sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit reference to the Christian alternative Tolstoy espoused.
The first two are rather simple didactic tales, juxtaposing materialism, greed, and vanity with Christian sincerity and humility. I think a person's... more info
