The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0140449612 ISBN 13: 9780140449617

Casa editrice: Penguin Classics, 2025

Riassunto

The Death of Ivan Il'ič and Other Stories è una raccolta di storie emerse da una profonda crisi spirituale, durante la quale Lev Tolstoj credeva di aver incontrato la morte stessa. Questa edizione Penguin Classics è tradotta con un'introduzione di Anthony Briggs, David McDuff e Ronald Wilks.Queste sette storie avvincenti esplorano, in modi molto diversi, la preoccupazione di Tolstoj per la mortalità. "The Death of Ivan Il'ič" è un racconto devastante di un uomo che lotta contro la sua inevitabile fine e pone la domanda esistenziale: perché una brava persona deve essere presa prima del suo tempo? In "Polikushka", la possibilità di un ubriaco dalle dita leggere di dimostrare il suo valore ha tragiche ripercussioni, mentre "Three Deaths" descrive gli ultimi momenti di un aristocratico, un contadino e un albero, e "The Forged Coupon" mostra un reato apparentemente minore che porta inesorabilmente a crimini sempre più orribili. E in tre racconti sui soldati, "Dopo il ballo", "L'abbattimento del bosco" e "Il raid", Tolstoj ritrae la brutalità che troppo spesso accompagna la vita militare. Le traduzioni di Anthony Briggs, David McDuff e Ronald Wilks catturano la prosa potente e vivida di Tolstoj. Questa edizione include anche una nuova introduzione di Anthony Briggs che discute il crollo di Tolstoj e l'effetto che questo ebbe sulla sua scrittura, così come una cronologia, ulteriori letture e note. Lev Tolstoj (1828-1910) nacque a Jasnaja Poljana, nella Russia centrale. Condusse una vita di ozio dispendioso fino al 1851, quando viaggiò nel Caucaso e si arruolò nell'esercito con il fratello maggiore, combattendo nella guerra di Crimea. Dopo aver sposato Sofya Behrs nel 1862, Tolstoj si stabilì, gestendo le sue proprietà e scrivendo due dei suoi romanzi più noti, Guerra e pace (1869) e Anna Karenina (1878). Nel 1884 Tolstoj attraversò una crisi spirituale, diventando un moralista estremo, rifiutando lo stato, la chiesa e la proprietà privata. Il suo ultimo romanzo, Resurrezione (1900), fu scritto per raccogliere fondi per la setta Doukhobor di spiritualisti cristiani.Se ti è piaciuto La morte di Ivan Il'ič, potresti apprezzare Delitto e castigo di Fëdor Dostoevskij, disponibile anche in Penguin Classics.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Count Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia. Orphaned at nine, he was brought up by an elderly aunt and educated by French tutors until he matriculated at Kazan University in 1844. In 1847, he gave up his studies and, after several aimless years, volunteered for military duty in the army, serving as a junior officer in the Crimean War before retiring in 1857. In 1862, Tolstoy married Sophie Behrs, a marriage that was to become, for him, bitterly unhappy. His diary, started in 1847, was used for self-study and self-criticism; it served as the source from which he drew much of the material that appeared not only in his great novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), but also in his shorter works. Seeking religious justification for his life, Tolstoy evolved a new Christianity based upon his own interpretation of the Gospels. Yasnaya Polyana became a mecca for his many converts At the age of eighty-two, while away from home, the writer suffered a break down in his health in Astapovo, Riazan, and he died there on November 20, 1910.

Anthony Briggs has written, translated, or edited twenty books in the fields of Russian and English literature.

David McDuff was educated at the University of Edinburgh and has translated a number of works for Penguin Classics, including Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Ronald Wilks studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. He has also translated ‘The Little Demon’ by Sologub and, for Penguin Classics, My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin and four volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Kiss and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Party and Other Stories and The Fiancée and Other Stories.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Hadji Murat

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I was returning home through the fields. It was the very middle of summer. The meadows had been mowed, and they were just
about to reap the rye.

There is a delightful assortment of flowers at that time of year: red, white, pink, fragrant, fluffy clover; impudent marguerites; milk-white “love-me-love-me-nots” with bright yellow centers and a fusty, spicy stink; yellow wild rape with its honey smell; tall-standing, tulip-shaped campanulas, lilac and white; creeping vetch; neat scabious, yellow, red, pink, and lilac; plantain with its faintly pink down and faintly perceptible, pleasant smell; cornflowers, bright blue in the sun and in youth, and pale blue and reddish in the evening and when old; and the tender, almond-scented, instantly wilting flowers of the bindweed.

I had gathered a big bouquet of various flowers and was walking home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a wonderful crimson thistle of the kind which is known among us as a “Tartar” and is carefully mowed around, and, when accidentally mowed down, is removed from the hay by the mowers, so that it will not prick their hands. I took it into my head to pick this thistle and put it in the center of the bouquet. I got down into the ditch and, having chased away a hairy bumblebee that had stuck itself into the center of the flower and sweetly and lazily fallen asleep there, I set about picking the flower. But it was very difficult: not only was the stem prickly on all sides, even through the handkerchief I had wrapped around my hand, but it was so terribly tough that I struggled with it for some five minutes, tearing the fibers one by one. When I finally tore off the flower, the stem was all ragged, and the flower no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful. Besides, in its coarseness and gaudiness it did not fit in with the delicate flowers of the bouquet. I was sorry that I had vainly destroyed and thrown away a flower that had been beautiful in its place. “But what energy and life force,” I thought, remembering the effort it had cost me to tear off the flower. “How staunchly it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life.”

The way home went across a fallow, just-plowed field of black earth. I walked up a gentle slope along a dusty, black-earth road. The plowed field was a landowner’s, a very large one, so that to both sides of the road and up the hill ahead nothing could be seen except the black, evenly furrowed, not yet scarified soil. The plowing had been well done; nowhere on the field was there a single plant or blade of grass to be seen—it was all black. “What a destructive, cruel being man is, how many living beings and plants he annihilates to maintain his own life,” I thought, involuntarily looking for something alive amidst this dead, black field. Ahead of me, to the right of the road, I spied a little bush. When I came closer, I recognized in this bush that same “Tartar” whose flower I had vainly picked and thrown away.

The “Tartar” bush consisted of three shoots. One had been broken off, and the remainder of the branch stuck out like a cut-off arm. On each of the other two there was a flower. These flowers had once been red, but now they were black. One stem was broken and half of it hung down, with the dirty flower at the end; the other, though all covered with black dirt, still stuck up. It was clear that the whole bush had been run over by a wheel, and afterwards had straightened up and therefore stood tilted, but stood all the same. As if a piece of its flesh had been ripped away, its guts turned inside out, an arm torn off, an eye blinded. But it still stands and
does not surrender to man, who has annihilated all its brothers around it.

“What energy!” I thought. “Man has conquered everything, destroyed millions of plants, but this one still does not surrender.”

And I remembered an old story from the Caucasus, part of which I saw, part of which I heard from witnesses, and part of which I imagined to myself. The story, as it shaped itself in my memory and imagination, goes like this.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Penguin Classics
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0140449612
• ISBN 13: 9780140449617
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 352
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: Penguin Random House Ireland Limited; productsafety@penguin.co.uk; ; Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street; Dublin; D02 YH68; Irlanda