This book is a great reading! These Chekhov's stories of the early period are full of humour: some of them are just funny but lots of them are psychologically deep. No surprise that most of these stories are widely recognised as masterpieces! Though written in the late XIX these stories are still of great importance for the contemporary reader because they deal with such eternal things as human soul and human character. And in such a funny manner! The translation is remarkable. Those who ever tried to translate literary prose from Russian into English know how difficult this task is. You can really enjoy Sekirin's publication : he succeeded in the translation of the most difficult passages, those in which Chekhov describes the specific atmosphere of Russian reality and even those in which Chekhov play words. Read this book and recommend it to everybody! It is a real treasure of humour and a great exhibition of human characters!

One of my favorites! I have a daily process, which includes morning reading of several great works. It didn't take long for this book to rise to the top. Tolstoy has done a great service to mankind through his collection of great insights and wisdom. Nicely translated by Peter Sekirin, this book is a treasure awaiting discovery! Tolstoy put a tremendous effort into his concept of "A wise thought for every day of the year, from the great philosophers of all times and all people." It took him over fifteen years of searching to compile this final version of which Tolstoy himself would consult daily for the rest of his life. Wisdom from the likes of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, Jesus, Confucius, Emerson, Kant, Ruskin, Seneca, Socrates, Thoreau and many more. Tolstoy's love and passion for his work shines through as he writes in his introduction..."I hope that the readers of this book may experience the same benevolent and elevating feeling which I have experienced when I was working on it's creation, and which I experience again and again when I reread it every day, working on the enlargement and improvement of the previous edition." I am sure that this book will be one of your all time favorites too!

Can it really be -- something new from Tolstoy? Perhaps a forgotten, 1,200-page canvass of history found propping up a broken bedstead at the great man's dacha? Is the mystic count of Russian literature about to have a go -- à la Louisa May Alcott -- at the late-20th century bestseller lists, thanks to a misplaced manuscript? Not quite. Tolstoy's "new" book, "A Calendar of Wisdom," has gone though the printing presses in Cyrillic several times, but has now been translated into English by Peter Sekirin.

"A Calendar of Wisdom" is a collection of quotations culled from world literature and grouped thematically for each day of the year. It is, in Tolstoy's words, "an accumulation of the cultural heritage of our ancestors, the best thinkers in the world."

This book is, by design, popular reading from a great master; it was made, in his words, "to present for a wide reading audience an easily accessible, everyday circle of reading which will arouse their best thoughts and feelings." And, as a book of daily inspiration, it is probably the best of the lot. Whose life wouldn't be bettered by a daily nibble of Shakespeare, Lao Tsu, Ruskin, the Talmud, the Dhammapada, Socrates, Jefferson and a host of small and tall 18th and 19th century thinkers?

Tolstoy's sentiments are truly affecting, simple but not easy prescriptions for daily living. But keep in mind that it was not enough for the count himself, who died -- barely two years after the publication of the last edition of the calendar -- at a lonely train station as he attempted to flee the bonds of his gentrified life.

In these readings life serves up some measures of grief as well as comfort food. It is in fact, Tolstoy's vision. I think of this calendar as Tolstoy's spiritual Rolodex; a kind of truth one can live and prosper with.

This 365 day journey compiled by Tolstoy is a journal that he himself read year after year following his authorship of it. The book contains wisdom from the world's various sacred texts, including wisdom from the Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions, and more. A wonderfully inspiring daily devotional that is perfect for open-minded individuals of all religions. Buy this book!!

Tolstoy considered the stories in this volume to be "the best achievements of Christian literature" infused with "continuous joy." Most of these human-divine stories can fill a reader's soul with the beauty that saves the world. Only when Tolstoy lapses didactic does the book's transfiguring clarity flag. Ten of these sixteen stories were adapted from French, English, Persian, or other Russian tales. I think these re-interpretations are the book's strongest pieces. "Sisters," a Maupassant tale in which "sailors spend six months of their pay in four hours of debauchery" jolts its hero (and readers) into seeing how close "fallen women" may come to us. In Tolstoy's re-telling of Victor Hugo's "The Power of Childhood" a father's determination to shield his boy's innocence meets with a bloodthirsty mob's blind fury. "I cannot judge others," says a merchant in the book's opening story. "We should forgive other people and love them." This theme of forgiveness and humble love weaves throughout Divine and Human. Humble people can be very wise. Is suffering integral to joy?

For those who find Tolstoy's novels too long, or love them anyhow, this is a collection of tiny, perfect short stories written near the end of Tolstoy's life, and newly translated into English. Well-developed characters circle around ethical and spiritual knots which refuse pat endings. All is illuminated by Tolstoy's intense and gentle wisdom. Suitable for children or adults, these characters will stay with you for a long time.

I'll be brief: this is a wonderful book to buy for your child and for your own reading pleasure. These short little stories are so true to life, easy to read and so full of wisdom that they haunted me for a long time after I read them. They make you stop and think. They make you wonder. They make you ask yourself questions. The characters described and their problems are very easy to identify with and, more importantly, they help you draw a line between the temporal and ordinary and the eternal truth of life. Very good read.

Encourage by the previous reviewers, I was excited to purchase an entire collection of Anton Chekhov's stories. However, the printing and binding of the books were extremely poor quality. I was afraid that the books would fall apart before I finished reading them. In addition, lines of text were printed on a slope (rather than in the standard straight line!). If Dr. Sekirin is serious about publishing his works-- please get a professional printer, publisher for your books. I was so disgusted, disappointed and immediately returned the books.

Encourage by the previous reviewers, I was excited to purchase an entire collection of Anton Chekhov's stories. However, the printing and binding of the books were extremely poor quality. I was afraid that the books would fall apart before I finished reading them. In addition, lines of text were printed on a slope (rather than in the standard straight line!). If Dr. Sekirin is serious about publishing his works-- please get a professional printer, publisher for your books. I was so disgusted, disappointed and immediately returned the books.

Anton Chekhov's industry defies belief. He was a
devoted and insightful physician. He supported his
dishevelled family from an early age. He traversed
Russia to the remote penal colonies in Sakhalin and
composed a report which remains a classic of muted
anger and compassion. His own health was frail and
he died at 44, his lungs wasted. Yet during that absurdly curtailed, harried existence,
Chekhov produced a constellation of stories that have altered the
history of literature. These
comprise titles which are among the supreme
achievements in prose narrative and have been
reproduced in a host of languages. To use that tired
banality, they are 'world classics'. Chekhov's genius coincided with the macabre
absurdities of a dying Tsarist empire. If he began in
the tragi-comic dispensation of Gogol, he died,
clairvoyantly, on the eve of the crises of 1905 and of
the iron age, soon to come, of Marxist-Leninism. Time
and again, Chekhov's plays, Mozartian in their smiling
sadness, capture the transient but irrecusable hour
between the old order, with its loving frivolity, and the
storms which will cut down the cherry orchards. It is
Chekhov's equipoise which remains unique, his ability
to move us almost unbearably in respect of a lost past
while making us understand the inevitability, indeed
the justice, of the imminent cataclysm. A further circumstance was that of the flowering of
journals, magazines, newspaper feuilletons in late
nineteenth-century Russia. Countless titles sprang up
like the mushrooms in Chekhov's cherished woods.
The appetite for sketches, anecdotes, prose
caricature was voracious. It fostered the techniques of
a distinctive tribe: that of Maupassant, O. Henry, Mark
Twain and, above all, Chekhov. The train was one of
feverish productivity, of that graphic incisiveness of
outline and incident which made of those decades the
brilliant age of the cartoon, of the illustrated serial. The
line between reportage and fiction, between social
satire and sentimental snapshots, was blurring. Needy
scribblers were remunerated by the word. It has long been known that much of Chekhov remains
untranslated and, indeed, uncollected. They
tell of a provincial world even when they transpire in a
large city; of loveless betrothals and wretched
marriages; of enraged cats and the fogged-in
landscape of vodka; of petty bureaucrats and petty
fraudsters. Trains rattle the drunk and the sober over
nocturnal emptiness. A man is saved from drowning
only to be shaken to death by a derisive crowd.
Would-be lovers belch or hiccup at decisive moments.
Beatings are followed by grotesquely litigious
demands for compensation. Two elements stand out. There is in these miniatures
an arresting potion of cruelty. This can take the form of
physical assault, of lacerating accidents. More subtly,
there is the unctuous sadism of money and of social
rank. Young women are simply sold off to rheumy,
ageing bidders. Alcoholics are mocked and
tormented when they cannot scrounge the kopek
needed for their next drink. The other trait concerns the often wretched condition
of women. Monied widowhood is their only nirvana.
Do these little texts deserve translation and
publication in this somewhat stately format? There are
flashes of true humour and chimes of pathos. A
masterly eye is gaining confidence in its economy of
observation. And even an ephemeral Chekhov is,
after all, Chekhov. None the less...