Leo Tolstoy: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1828 to 1910
Quick answer: Leo Tolstoy as a short story writer: the parables, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "How Much Land Does a Man Need?", and what their plain method teaches.
Quick facts
- Born: 1828, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province
- Died: 1910, Astapovo railway station, aged 82
- Wrote in: Russian
- Known for: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "How Much Land Does a Man Need?", "Master and Man"
- Signature move: The plain parable that closes with a measurement
- Start with: "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886)
After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy decided that the novels were a vanity and set out to write stories a peasant could read aloud. The result is a body of short fiction unlike anything else by a major novelist: folk tales, parables, and two or three long stories about dying that are as exact as anything in the novels. The style is deliberately bare, and it is much harder to do than it looks.
What he actually does on the page
He tells you the end first and makes the middle the point. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) opens with colleagues reading the death notice and calculating their promotions, then goes back to the beginning of a career. The sentence that governs the whole story is stated plainly: "Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Everything after it is evidence.
He uses folk-tale repetition as structure. In "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886) the peasant Pahom acquires land three times, each time more, each time with the Devil's help arranged in the first chapter. The repetition is not padding; it teaches the reader the rhythm so the fourth movement, the day-long run across the Bashkir steppe, can break it.
He puts the servant at the centre. Gerasim, the peasant who holds Ivan Ilyich's legs and is the only person who does not lie to him, is the moral measure of the story. In "Master and Man" (1895) the merchant Vasili Andreevich, lost with his servant Nikita in a blizzard, first abandons him and then lies on top of him to keep him alive, and dies doing it. Tolstoy's late stories keep asking who is actually useful in a room.
The signature move
The parable that ends in a measurement is his most teachable device. Pahom has run all day to enclose as much land as he can before sunset; he reaches the hillock as the sun sets and drops dead. The servant digs him a grave, and the story ends with the line: "Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed." Every chapter before it has been about quantity, desyatinas and roubles and days of walking, and the last sentence answers the title with a number. The lesson for a writer is that a moral does not need to be stated if the story has trained the reader to count.
Stories to read first
Seven stories, from the reader's primers to the last decade.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The preaching. Late Tolstoy sometimes forgot that he had already made the point, and "Where Love Is, God Is" and several of the shortest tales end with the Bible verse the story just dramatised. His views on women, art and sex in this period were harsh, and "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889) is a story worth reading and not worth imitating. Take the plainness, the count and the servant's eye; leave the pulpit.
Life at a glance
- 1828: Born on the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana
- 1855: Sevastopol Sketches, written as a serving artillery officer
- 1869: War and Peace completed
- 1877: Anna Karenina completed
- 1882: A Confession, the record of the crisis that turned him toward parables and plain speech
- 1886: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"
- 1895: "Master and Man"
- 1910: Leaves home in October and dies at Astapovo station in November
What writers can take from this
- Begin at the death and go back; the reader who knows the end watches the middle more closely.
- Choose a unit of measure and let the story count.
- Repeat a structure three times before you break it.
- Let the character with the least status see the most.
- Write for a listener, not a critic; Tolstoy tested his tales by reading them aloud to peasants.
Try it yourself
A person who has spent a lifetime acquiring something (followers, square footage, qualifications) is given one day to take as much as they can hold. Write the day in under 1,000 words, in plain sentences a child could follow, with the total rising every scene. End on a single measurement that answers the story's title.
Questions
What is Leo Tolstoy's best short story?
"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) is the one most critics choose. Among the parables, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886) is the most admired; James Joyce called it the greatest story in the world.
How did Tolstoy influence the short story?
He showed that a moral tale could be written with a novelist's precision, and "Ivan Ilyich" set the pattern for fiction about dying. His plain late style influenced Chekhov's contemporaries and, through translation, Hemingway and many others.
Is Tolstoy hard to read?
The late stories are the easiest way into him: short, plainly written and free of the digressions of the novels. The Maude translations are in the public domain and remain good.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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