The Russian novelist and moral philosopher Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) ranks as one of the world’s greatest writers. This edition of his selected works brings his thirty-five best short stories ranging from stories for children, stories for the people, and Russian folk tales to his adaptations from French stories and the ones written for the Jewish pogrom victims in Russia. The purpose of all true creative art, he believed, is to teach. But the message in all his stories is presented with such humour that the reader hardly realizes that it is strongly didactic.