There_Are_No_Guilty_People

There Are No Guilty People

There Are No Guilty People

Short story by Leo Tolstoy

"There Are No Guilty People" (AKA: "There Are No Guilty People in the World") is a short story by Leo Tolstoy written in 1909.[1] According to the Cambridge Companion on Tolstoy, the work is directed against the death penalty. It was incomplete, and when published after Tolstoy's death, resulted in a flood of letters, the reaction mixed. The government tried to censor the work, sentencing one person distributing copies of it to prison.[2]

Composition and Publication

According to literary critic Andrei Zorin, it was written in 1909, near his death (1910), when Tolstoy was physically unable to write fiction, that he had composed this piece. During this time, Tolstoy wrote in his diary that he still wanted to produce artistic work, "but without real desire of the kind I had before with a clear goal, but without any goal or rather with a hidden and unattainable goal of peering into the human soul."[3]

This story is included in many of the popular collections of Leo Tolstoy's work, such as "The Forged Coupon and Other Stories" (1911)[1][4] and "Leo Tolstoy's 20 Greatest Short Stories" (2009).[5]

See also

References

  1. [1]
    Leo Tolstoy. The Forged Coupon and Other Stories.
  2. [2]
    Donna Tussing Orwin (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. Cambridge University Press. p. 44.
  3. [3]
    Andrei Zorin (2020). Leo Tolstoy. Reaktion Books.
  4. [4]
    "The Forged Coupon, and Other Stories and Dramas". University of Pennsylvania. Note: London et al.: T. Nelson and Sons, ca. 1911
  5. [5]
    Leo Tolstoy (2009). Andrew Barger (ed.). Leo Tolstoy's 20 Greatest Short Stories Annotated. Bottletree Books.


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