The term povest' has a somewhat fluid meaning in Russian, as a term defining a work of fiction which can range in size between what is normally called a short story and what might also be a short novel. Tolstoy’s most notable fictional works of the 1880s and 1890s fall into this category. They cannot match such masterpieces of the 1860s and 1870s as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but they are manifestly superior to the short works of fiction designed to illustrate his religious ideas and can claim our attention more readily than his dramas or his last novel, Resurrection. They owe their power chiefly to the way they focus upon a single foreground figure and portray that figure’s life as having meaning principally in the light of Tolstoy’s ideas on death, sex, and spirituality. Apparently single-voiced and lacking the multiplicity of central figures and viewpoints of the great novels, the Tolstoyan long short story can demonstrate more directly the purpose of his art as a vehicle for infecting the reader with the author’s feelings.

The Death of Ivan Ilich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Father Sergius illustrate the power of this infection in remarkable ways through depicting the experience of one individual. The psychologizing impulse in Tolstoy turns them not into tracts so much as into semi-autobiographical dramatizations of lives largely lived on false premises; and it is a falsity highlighted by one episode. Apparent authorial absence, an artful documentary objectivity, naturalistic dialogue, and a well-paced narrative drive make them models of a “moodless” povest’ form designed as parables illustrating Tolstoyan doctrine. Inevitably an air of emotional sterility or clinical exactitude suggests withdrawal of sympathy, a literal defamiliarizing of the subject-matter, and, to that extent, a degree of alienation.