Father Sergius and other Short Stories

by Leo Tolstoy, Simon Vance (Narrated by)

Overview

Tolstoy is perhaps best recognized as the author of the classic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. While he was able to sustain complex and moving plots through large novels, his ability as a writer also is demonstrated in his many short stories. Tolstoy brings to these brief tales the same psychological depth and spiritual insight found in his larger works. In fact, his short stories are an excellent place to begin reading this great author. In them, you will find the same challenging thees of morality, forgiveness, redemption and more.

The stories in this work include:

• God Sees the Truth, But Waits
• A Prisoner in the Caucuses
• Alyosha the Pot
• Father Sergius
• What Men Live By
• Where Love Is, God Is

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2000003477173
Publisher:	christianaudio
Publication date:	06/29/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

About the Author

Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, where he spent most of his early years, together with his several brothers. In 1844 he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental Languages and later Law, but left before completing a degree. He spent the following years in a round of drinking, gambling and womanizing, until weary of his idle existence he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851.

He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sevastopol wrote The Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856 Tolstoy spent some time mixing with the literati in St Petersburg before traveling abroad and then settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. His marriage to Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862 marked the beginning of a period of contentment centred around family life; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy managed his vast estates, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote both his great novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877).

During the 1870s he underwent a spiritual crisis, the moral and religious ideas that had always dogged him coming to the fore. A Confession (1879¿82) marked an outward change in his life and works; he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and in a series of pamphlets written after 1880 he rejected church and state, indicted the demands of flesh, and denounced private property. His teachings earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, and also led finally to his excommunication by the Russian Holy Synod in 1901. In 1910 at the age of eighty-two he fled from home "leaving this worldly life in order to live out my last days in peace and solitude;" he died some days later at the station master's house at Astapovo.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Books LTD.

Date of Birth:

September 9, 1828

Date of Death:

November 2, 1910

Place of Birth:

Tula Province, Russia

Place of Death:

Astapovo, Russia

Education:

Privately educated by French and German tutors; attended the University of Kazan, 1844-47