Monday 10 December 2007

Tolstoy: Master and Man

I recently consumed, in an intellectual sense as opposed to a nutritional one, a book of short stories by Tolstoy, called Master and Man. In short, the stories are imbued with a magnificent profound simplicity, especially the title story which is one of the zeniths of literature. Oddly, the story How Much Land Does a Man Need?, which I found a bit too bound to the yoke of its moral intent and rendered somewhat tedious as a consequence, was described by James Joyce as the greatest short story ever written. Which just goes to show how one can never trust a Dub.
My other reading of Tolstoy consists of Anna Karenina, which I admit to not especially mad about, but subsequently found War and Peace to be superb.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wittgenstein was a big Hadji Murad fan.

Anonymous said...

And of Tolstoy's The Gospels in Brief.