Lev Nikolajevič Tolstoj

This edition includes: The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Happy Ever After, and The Cossacks. Mortality was one of Tolstoy's most persistent themes, and all of the stories in this volume are connected by this preoccupation, along with the author's simultaneous attempt to help us improve our lives.

Dissatisfied with his life of frivolity among the aristocracy of Moscow, young Dmitri Andreyevitch Oleynin sets out for the Caucasus region. Here, among the natural beauty of his surroundings and the honest and industrious peasant people, Oleynin hopes to obtain a more meaningful existence. Yet Oleynin is marked out …