I have behaved very badly.”1 His impeccable artistry and sensitivity led him to imagine the story from the point of view of the young woman, and thus it took on its own life, its own truth. But the bad behavior continued to haunt him; after the story was done and was set to be published, he wrote to a friend that it was a vile, loathsome work, and begged him to burn the manuscript.

At that time, still unmarried, he had not yet personally experienced the tortuous ups and downs of family happiness. He married only a few years later, in 1862, when he was thirty-four. His bride was the eighteen-year-old Sofya Andreyevna Bers, with whom he would live almost fifty years and who would bear thirteen of his children. Because he wanted their relationship to be completely honest, he invited her to read his diaries before their wedding. Such a dose of the truth was more than she really wanted. She was in love, and was able, she thought, to forgive Tolstoy his past affairs—but his diaries made them so vivid that they festered in her all the rest of her life.

The hardest to deal with were his fevered words about a married young peasant woman named Aksinya, who had borne him a son and with whom he had had a deep, passionate affair till two years before his marriage. That affair was part of the genesis of “The Devil.” But according to Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy’s friend and translator, the story was also based on an incident from 1880, when Tolstoy asked a tutor at Yasnaya Polyana, his estate, to accompany him on his daily walks to keep him from acting on a temptation. As he confessed to the tutor, he had arranged an assignation with the servants’ cook, which had only been prevented when one of his children called out to him as he was setting out to meet her. Tolstoy’s daughter Aleksandra said that he had dashed off a draft of “The Devil” in the fall of 1889 and then put it aside for twenty years before revising it.2 He kept it hidden from Sofya in order to keep her jealousy of Aksinya, which had never ceased to torment her, from flaring up again.

Right up to the end, “The Devil” is vital, genuine, and impassioned—“real,” as Mark Van Doren says, “in the same awful way in which Tolstoi at his best was always real—and in a way that the term ‘realism,’ incidentally, cannot illuminate.”3 It is well worth reading, but the ending—or lack of one—is a terrible disappointment. Tolstoy wrote two different endings, both of which are included here, but neither fits well with what has gone before, and it is unlikely that either was satisfying to him. And that is certainly at least one reason why the story was not published till after his death.

Another of the stories not published till after his death was “Father Sergius.” In the late 1870s Tolstoy had gone through a spiritual crisis (detailed in A Confession, 1882) that had left him almost suicidal and had led him to embrace a Christianity of self-denial. In his earlier fiction, he had approached the world with artistry and an open mind. In his later work the artistry is still there, but it is sometimes at war with the spiritual message he wants to convey. As in most of Tolstoy’s fiction, the twists and turns of “Father Sergius” are as unpredictable as those of life. But once again the ending feels forced.

Some literary historians have suggested that Tolstoy avoided publishing “Father Sergius” and several other stories in order to minimize friction with his wife. It’s true that he had given up the copyrights of all of his later work, and that Sofya disagreed with this decision, as she disagreed with so much of the way he was living. So perhaps it was because he wanted to avoid quarreling with her about publication rights that he did not publish “Father Sergius” or “The Devil.” But it also seems likely that he wasn’t completely satisfied with them.

Tolstoy was, after all, his own harshest critic. Even when he felt good about his work, he often remained uncertain about whether it was worth publishing. For instance, when he had finished “Master and Man”4—the most powerful of the stories included here—Tolstoy needed to be reassured, and sent the manuscript to a friend, saying “It is so long since I’ve written anything artistic that I truly do not know whether it ought to be printed.” “My God!” his friend wrote back, “how splendid, priceless it is . . .”5 His friend was right. It may have been Tolstoy’s religious beliefs that moved him to write the story, but the story remains deeply human and moving in every detail. And yes—priceless.

The remaining two stories are much shorter, and both are charming and unusual. The first, “Three Deaths,” is from his early period. He wrote it long before his spiritual crisis and conversion, and it has almost a Taoist feeling. This is what he had to say about it in a letter to his cousin Alexandra before the story was published:

My idea was this: three creatures died . . . .