CLASSIC STORIES

CHAPTER  2 { 1  }. - At Vozvizhensk, the advanced fort situated some ten miles from the aoul in which Hadji Murad was spending the night, three soldiers and a non-commissioned officer left the fort and went beyond the Shahgirinsk Gate. The soldiers, dressed as Caucasian soldiers used to be in those days, wore sheepskin coats and caps, and boots that reached above their knees, and they carried their cloaks tightly rolled up and fastened across their shoulders. Shouldering arms, they first went some five hundred paces along the road and then turned off it and went some twenty paces to the right__the dead leaves rustling under their boots__till they reached the blackened trunk of a broken plane tree just visible through the darkness. There they stopped. It was at this plane tree that an ambush party was usually placed.

CHAPTER  #  1  #  1  > I was returning home by the fields. It was midsummer; the hay harvest was over, and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of flowers__red white and pink scented tufty clover; milk-white ox-eye daisies with their bright yellow centres and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms; tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow red and pink scabious; plantains with faintly-scented nearly-arranged purple, slightly oink-tinged blossoms; corn-flowers, bright blue in the sunshine and while still young, but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate quickly-withering almond-scented dodder flowers. I gather a large nosegay of these different flowers, and was going home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full blossom, a beautiful thistle plant of the crimson kind, which in our neighbourhood they call "Tarta...

HADJI MURAD  !!!!!! #  1  > "I am writing to you specially to say how glad I have been to be your contemporary, and to express my last and sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you from whence comes all the rest. . . . Great writer of our Russian land, listen to my wish!" So wrote Turgenev on his deathbed to Tolstoy, when the latter, absorbed in religious struggles and studies, had for five years produced no work of art save one short story. #  2  > Nor was it long before the wish was realised, for three years later Tolstoy was writing "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," and that tremendous drama , "The Power Darkness;" and these were followed by a number of short stories, some plays, a long novel ( "Resurrection" ) and the works now posthumously published.