The Novellas

Leo Tolstoy: The Novellas includes unabridged recordings of Leo Tolstoy's 11 greatest novellas in one audiobook, all read by Audie Award-winning narrators

This audiobook is fully indexed. Once downloaded, each book and chapter will be listed so you can easily navigate to the individual section.

Childhood; Boyhood; Youth - A charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and color.

Family Happiness - A seventeen-year-old girl marries a much older man. Initially distressed to find that her naive conception of marriage did not adequately prepare her for the complexities her new life, Mashechka becomes corrupted by the pretentious frivolities of St. Petersburg society.

The Cossacks - Dmitry Andreich Olenin, in the hope of escaping the hollowness of his privilege, joins the army and heads to the Caucasus. There among the foothills he will meet the Cossacks: a people he considers to be at one with the land. In their company he will hunt, he will drink, he will fall in love and, slowly, he will begin to understand that between people, between cultures, there is often a space that cannot be traversed.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

The Kreutzer Sonata - When Marshal of the Nobility Pozdnyshev suspects his wife of having an affair with her music partner, his jealousy consumes him and drives him to murder. Controversial upon publication in 1890, The Kreutzer Sonata illuminates Tolstoy's then-feverish Christian ideals, his conflicts with lust and the hypocrisies of nineteenth-century marriage, and his thinking on the role of art and music in society.

The Devil - A scintillating study of sexual attraction and human obsession that Tolstoy thought so scandalous he hid the manuscript in the upholstery of a chair in his office so his wife wouldn't find it, and would never allow it to be published in his lifetime.

The Forged Coupon - Tolstoy's final novella, this is an ingenious study of the destructive powers of evil set against a brilliant depiction of Russian life.

Hadji Murat - Tolstoy, witness to many of the events leading to Hadji Murad's death, set down this story with painstaking accuracy to preserve for future generations the horror, nobility, and destruction inherent in war.

Sevastopol Sketches - In the winter of 1854 Tolstoy, then an officer in the Russian army, arranged to be transferred to the besieged town of Sebastopol. Wishing to see at first hand the action of what would become known as the Crimean War, he was spurred on by a fierce patriotism, but also by an equally fierce desire to alert the authorities to appalling conditions in the army.