Leo Tolstoy undertook the writing of the stories in Divine and Human and Other Stories around the time of the 1905 revolution in Russia. While doing so, he drew on the tragic past of Russia and its empire to comment on the issues and ideas of the day. Tolstoy had long before taken on the mantle of sage, and in addition to his treatises and essays on religious and social topics, he continued to write many works of fiction. The stories "Divine and Human", "Berries", and "What For?" are collected together here for the first time, and they show the depth of -- and contradictions in -- Tolstoy's thought as he tried to reconcile his harsh religious beliefs with humanistic appeals for justice. Taken as a whole the collection is a revealing look at the irreconcilable life and thought of a literary giant.

LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) wrote two of the great novels of the nineteenth century, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

GORDON SPENCE is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He is the author of Tolstoy the Ascetic and has published widely on English authors.