A Landowner's Morning
"A Landowner's Morning", also translated as "A Morning of a Landed Proprietor" is a short story by Leo Tolstoy written and published in 1856, early in Tolstoy's career. It is a fragment of Tolstoy's unfinished Novel of a Russian Landowner.
Publication history
In 1856, before Tolstoy signed a contract with The Contemporary, he promised a story to its main rival, Notes of the Fatherland. It was the era of a new tsar, when writers could say more about problems in Russia such as the serfdom, and when Turgenev published A Hunter's Notes. Tolstoy at the time was writing a large work called Novel of a Russian Landowner, which he considered then the most important of his works. Even at the beginning of his career, Tolstoy regarded writing as serving a social purpose, and not as existing solely for entertainment,[1] and the novel was to be, as he said, "novel with a purpose": "I shall give an account of the evil of [the Russian?] government and if I find it satisfactory, then I shall devote the remainder of my life to working out a plan for an aristocratic, electoral system of government joined with a monarchic system, on the basis of existing alternatives. Here is an aim for a virtuous life." However, Tolstoy didn't continue working on it, and instead, he extracted a story from the written part of his novel. "A Landowner's Morning" was published in December 1856 in Notes of the Fatherland.[2][3]
Plot
The main character of the story is Prince Nekhliudov, the semi-autobiographical character also featured in Tolstoy's trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth; Nekhliudov is also the main character of Tolstoy's last novel Resurrection. The story tells about Nekhliudov's efforts to become a good manager of his property and to assist his serfs at the same time.
Reception
The story was well received. Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote in The Contemporary "that Tolstoy reproduces with remarkable mastery not only the external conditions of the everyday life of the inhabitants, but what is much more important, their point of view on things. He knows how to put himself into the soul of the peasants."[4]
English translations
- 1904, as"A Morning of a Landed Proprietor", by Leo Wiener.
- 1984, as "A Landowner's Morning", by Kyril and April FitzLyon.[5]
See also
External links
- English Text
- A Morning of a Landed Proprietor, from RevoltLib.com
- A Morning of a Landed Proprietor, from Marxists.org
- A Morning of a Landed Proprietor, from TheAnarchistLibrary.org
- A Morning of a Landed Proprietor, from Archive.org
References
- ^ George Steiner (1959). Tolstoy Or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. Open Road Media. ISBN 9781480411913.
- ^ Bartlett, Rosamund (2011). Tolstoy: A Russian Life. ISBN 978-0151014385.
- ^ Grigoryan, Bella (20 February 2018). Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861. ISBN 9781501757310.
- ^ Wasiolek, Edward (1978). Tolstoy's Major Fiction. ISBN 9780226873985.
- ^ Tolstoy, Graf Leo (1984). A Landowner's Morning ; Family Happiness ; and, the Devil: Three Novellas. ISBN 9780704324268.
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- Childhood (1852)
- Boyhood (1854)
- Youth (1856)
- The Cossacks (1863)
- War and Peace (1869)
- Anna Karenina (1878)
- Resurrection (1899)
- Hadji Murat (1912)
- A Landowner's Morning (1856)
- Two Hussars (1856)
- Family Happiness (1859)
- Polikúshka (1860)
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
- Walk in the Light While There is Light (1888)
- The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
- The Devil (1889)
- Master and Man (1895)
- Father Sergius (1898)
- The Forged Coupon (1904)
- "The Raid" (1852)
- "The Cutting of the Forest" (1855)
- "Sevastopol Sketches" (1855)
- "Recollections of a Billiard-marker" (1855)
- "The Snowstorm" (1856)
- "Lucerne" (1857)
- "Albert" (1858)
- "Three Deaths" (1859)
- "The Porcelain Doll" (1863)
- "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" (1872)
- "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" (1872)
- "The Bear Hunt" (1872)
- "What Men Live By" (1881)
- "Diary of a Lunatic" (1884)
- "Quench the Spark" (1885)
- "An Old Acquaintance" (1885)
- "Where Love Is, God Is" (1885)
- "Ivan the Fool" (1885)
- "Evil Allures, But Good Endures" (1885)
- "Wisdom of Children" (1885)
- "The Three Hermits" (1886)
- "Promoting a Devil" (1886)
- "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886)
- "The Grain" (1886)
- "Repentance" (1886)
- "Croesus and Fate" (1886)
- "Kholstomer" (1886)
- "The Two Brothers and the Gold" (1886)
- "A Lost Opportunity" (1889)
- "A Dialogue Among Clever People" (1892)
- "The Coffee-House of Surat" (1893)
- "The Young Tsar" (1894)
- "Too Dear!" (1897)
- "Work, Death, and Sickness" (1903)
- "Three Questions" (1903)
- "Alyosha the Pot" (1905)
- "After the Ball" (1911)
- The Power of Darkness (1886)
- The First Distiller (1886)
- The Light Shines in the Darkness (1890)
- The Fruits of Enlightenment (1891)
- The Living Corpse (1900)
- The Cause of It All (1910)
- A History of Yesterday (1851)
- Confession (1882)
- The Gospel in Brief (1883)
- What I Believe (1884)
- What Is to Be Done? (1886)
- The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894)
- What Is Art? (1897)
- "A Letter to a Hindu" (1908)
- The Inevitable Revolution (1909)
- A Calendar of Wisdom (1910)
- The Decembrists (1884)
- "Posthumous Notes of the Hermit Fëdor Kuzmich" (1905)
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- The Last Station (1990 novel)
- 2009 film)
- Story of One Appointment (2018 film)
- A Couple (2022 film)
- Tolstoy Farm
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- The Triumph of the Farmer or Industry and Parasitism (1888)
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