“This collection is designed as a companion volume to Short Stories, Volume One (Modern Library), which contains all Tolstoy’s early efforts in the genre before he embarked on his first full-length novel, War and Peace. In the present volume are the short stories he wrote after his great novel, that is, roughly, from 1870 to his death in 1910. These two collections, taken together, provide all the essential material for a comprehensive study of Tolstoy’s artistic development and accomplishments in the short-story form. More than this, they offer a rare treat for enthusiasts of the brief tale, which is now deservedly coming back into popularity, and they also tell us much about Tolstoy the artist and thinker.

“In any comparison of the two volumes, one is immediately struck by the relatively limited output in the second in terms of the forty years involved. Several reasons come to mind but perhaps the important one is that Tolstoy’s enormous success in the novel, which began with War and Peace and was augmented by Ann Karenina, and, later Resurrection, served to lessen his interest in the short story. But more striking is the marked thematic difference. With few exceptions, tales in this second collection were apparently not written to enhance a literary reputation. Most of them seem to have been inspired by an uneasy conscience or a deliberate subjective purpose, yet among them are several short stories that have often been acclaimed as Tolstoy’s greatest. Of course, the difference in his approach and subject matter was connected with the profound spiritual crisis he underwent at the beginning of the 1880’s, an experience which altered the course of his life as well as his attitude toward art.”

-From the Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons