Tales from Russia

“To compose short edifying stories,” noted young Leo Tolstoy in his notebooks in 1852, thirty years before writing these tales.

Translated into French in 1886, shortly after their publication in Russian, they were then published in two volumes, under the titles In Search of Happiness and Ivan the Fool. Inspired by both Herodotus' Histories and Oriental tales heard from the Bashkirs of the Samara Oblast, as well as his own reflections, these fables, which sometimes take on the appearance of parables, explore “the serious questions of the essence of life, perfect happiness, and truth,” as his translator tells us.

Extolling nature and the peasant world, these texts, which immerse us in the daily life of the muzhiks of his time, were primarily written for them. Indeed, following his idea that the essence of religious teaching is what is understandable to everyone in the Gospels, the author wanted the spirit of Christ, far from dogmas, to reach the simplest of men, even if he were illiterate.

From the shoemaker who awaits Jesus, before realizing he has already met him, to the one who unknowingly took him in, from the imps who deploy a thousand tricks to corrupt men, to the peasant who wanted more land than he could walk around, from the unjustly condemned merchant who frees himself without escaping, to the neighbors who lost everything over an egg until they found forgiveness, Tolstoy, convinced that human consciousness is guided by divine light, sets out here to reveal it in the actions of the humblest, but sometimes also the most cunning who had lost their souls. Influenced by Proudhon and Kropotkin, but also by Rousseau, he pleads, through these narratives, in favor of every man's natural right to land, and everyone's right to the benefit of their labor, revealing his distrust of the State and its violence, because "only obedience to the moral law must govern humanity."