Father Sergius, by Leo Tolstoy

Very enjoyable and thought provoking story about a young Russian nobleman and military officer who is disillusioned by human weakness, vice, and sin in the world and decides to give up a brilliant military career to become a priest.  He discovers to his chagrin that sin and weakness have a long reach. They continue to bedevil him even as a priest in a big city, then even as a hermit in a remote monastery.  His search for spiritual improvement does not prove fruitless, however, because he realizes what his most insidious fault is when he abandons his hermitage in shame after a serious lapse and visits an old childhood friend in reduced circumstances.     

I suspect this story may have been inspired by Tsar Alexander I, who was rumored to have faked his death and entered a monastery, living the rest of his life under an assumed identity.

Three Questions, by Leo Tolstoy

This story is an excellent cure for two kinds of people: 1. procrastinators, and 2. those who have a tendency to overthink things or who believe there is some grand theory that will solve all problems if only they knew it. The king in this story is searching for knowledge that will help make him a better king when consistently applied. The hermit demonstrates how much more simple life is. There is no grand theory. You just have to take life as it comes in all its variety and do your best to figure out what is right for each situation.

Twilight and Moonbeam Alley, by Stefan Zweig

 I find that there is something almost cinematic about Stefan Zweig’s writings. He has a talent for creating scenes in the reader’s imagination that draws them in and makes them feel what the characters are feeling. Both stories in this collection deal with despair, loneliness, and the isolation of human beings from each other.

Twilight is about a high ranking lady who has fallen out of favor with the king. She is obliged to leave Versailles to stay at her estate in a sleepy rural town. Accustomed to being the center of attention because of her great influence at court, she never realized that she was just as dependent on the flattery and attention of other people as they were on her for the favors she could grant. After living a life that revolved around creating an outward image for the public to admire, she is not capable of cultivating an interior life, and the scant social life in the little town leaves her no scope for her talents. She begins to contemplate suicide, after throwing a lavish party at her estate to give her society friends the impression that her banishment did not affect her too much. A deceptive appearance, however, does not change the underlying reality. Zweig’s portrayal of this woman’s despair while walking alone by candlelight through the rooms of a dark empty chateau, with only the occasional appearance of a servant to do something for her, is very vivid.

Moonbeam Alley is about a man whose pride and avarice drove his own wife away. Despite his repentance and willingness to reconcile, she prefers to support herself as a prostitute, for independence, and also to humiliate him. The atmosphere of this story is reminiscent of a film noir movie—all dark alleys, seedy tenements, and moody, dimly lighted little bars that are all but impossible to recognize in the daytime, since they only come alive at night.

Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day, by Katherine Mansfield

Amusing story about a typical day in the life of a man (a singing teacher) who has a quite high opinion of himself. He condescends to tolerate the foibles and shortcomings of those around him, of course not recognizing that he has any of his own.

The Lady with the Little Dog, by Anton Chekhov

This is the first Chekhov story I've ever read. He has a spare style--not too much description, dialogue or psychological analysis. The details he does give about the characters and their interactions are suggestive enough so that you can get a really vivid sense of the personalities and what they're thinking out of what he does tell you. This story had an unresolved ending, so it came across as a "slice of life" type sketch rather than a complete story where you know exactly what happened to everyone.

Incident on Lake Geneva, by Stefan Zweig

As I see it, An Incident on Lake Geneva is a short story about the increasing incomprehensibility of the modern world, particularly during wartime, and how alien it has become to man’s nature.

 One day, during World War II, a fisherman on Lake Geneva picks up a nearly naked man floating about in the water on a homemade raft.  The man can’t speak any language that the fisherman knows, so when he gets to shore (causing a sensation because of the man’s unusual appearance) he takes the man to the local authorities and they find a hotel owner who can speak Russian, the only language the fugitive speaks.   It turns out the man is a Siberian peasant from the very beautiful, very isolated region of Lake Baikal.  He was conscripted into the Red Army, fought in the war, was taken prisoner, then escaped.  All he wants is to get home to his wife and children, so he has been slowly making his way back as best he can.  Because the war is still going on, the Swiss hotel owner and the authorities offer him lodging at a local inn, saying he can’t go back yet because the war is still on.  The man can’t seem to understand why he can’t do something so natural as to go home, and his anxiety over his family’s well-being and despair of ever seeing them again get the better of him.

It's a very short story, so the characters and plot are not as complex as in the other Zweig stories I've read, but it's a moving description of a situation that illustrates a larger truth.

Journey into the Past, by Stefan Zweig

Zweig again displays his talent for coming up with interesting situations, realistic characters, and psychological insight in this short story about a young man at the start of a promising career who falls in love with his boss's wife, and then is separated from her due to being transferred overseas for much longer than expected because of World War I.  Will they be able to pick up where they left off, or not? 

A Train of Powder, by Rebecca West

A group I belong to was doing a challenge throughout the month of October to read books by or about people or places in Ireland.  Since Rebecca West, the journalist, travel writer, and novelist was part Irish and she was born in Kerry, this was one of the books I read for it.  As is probably obvious from the cover art, <i>A Train of Powder</i> is a collection of six articles she wrote while covering various criminal trials.  They read more like short stories than like magazine articles because the author really develops the characters, their background, the circumstances of the crimes, and also her own thoughts on the situations.

Three of the articles make up a series called <i> Greenhouse with Cyclamens</i>, where she relates her thoughts during the closing sessions of the Nuremberg Trials and the rebuilding of Germany, including her observations of the personalities of top Nazi leaders like Goering and Hess as they sat in the dock, differences between German and American/British law, growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the other three Allies who shared control of Germany, leading up to the Soviets’ attempt to isolate Berlin from the West and the resulting Berlin Airlift, and the nascent West German government’s insistence on a free market economy despite pressure from the occupying Allies to adopt a more statist model.

 <i>Opera in Greenville</i> is about a lynching in Greenville, South Carolina in 1947.  A mob of about 30 people, mostly cabdrivers, convinced the prison warden to hand over a young black man named Willie Earle, in jail on suspicion of having killed the disabled white cabdriver who was driving him home.  After some days of no results from the local police, the FBI was called in to find the perpetrators.  West does a good job of sketching out what life was like in 1940’s Greenville and situating the crime in a society undergoing a transition in its attitudes towards race relations and vigilante justice.  

<i>Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume</i> is about a 1949 London murder case.   A man who enjoys hunting on weekends goes out in his boat to the marshlands at the mouth of the Thames hoping to bag some duck.  Instead, he comes across a bag full of a more grisly type of meat.  The remains turn out to be those of Mr. Setty, a shady businessman and member of a well-to-do immigrant family.  Mr. Hume is the ex-R.A.F. pilot with a checkered past charged with the murder and disposal of the body.

<i>A Better Mousetrap</i> is the story of an espionage case involving a young British radio telegraph operator employed at the Diplomatic Wireless Service suspected of passing information to a high official in the Soviet embassy.

Confusion, by Stefan Zweig

I was in the mood for a mystery story of some kind, and this short novel hit the spot.  In it, an elderly literature professor reminisces about his youth--about his upbringing as the son of a schoolmaster in a country town, the initially rocky start to his college career in Berlin, where, like so many students in our days too, he neglects his studies and falls into a dissipated lifestyle, and how he transferred to a university in a smaller town with fewer distractions and met the professor whose passion about Elizabethan literature inspired his own career.

There is a mystery about this professor, whose brilliant lectures about his subject on some days alternate with humdrum, ordinary teaching on others, and his lack of major publications.  Then there's his unlikely choice of wife, an athletic woman much younger than himself who shares none of his scholarly interests or habits and whose relationship to her husband seems strangely detached.  Add to that a habit of sudden, unexplained absences for days at a time, when even his wife has no idea where he is, and erratic behavior, when he alternates between obvious enjoyment of teaching and working on his book with his student and brusque dismissal, and you can see why the student is confused and becomes determined to figure out what's going on.

Fear by Stefan Zweig

Irene is a beautiful, self-centered, spoiled woman, the wife of a wealthy lawyer who takes everything for granted.  From childhood, she has lived the kind of life where everything has been handed to her on a silver platter.  She decides to indulge in an extramarital affair with a poor musician, which leads to blackmail.  It's a new experience for her, as this is a difficulty she must handle all on her own or risk losing everything she has--husband, children, luxurious lifestyle, social standing, all of which she only learns to appreciate when threatened with losing them.

Very entertaining story of a woman who gets her comeuppance with an unexpected twist at the end.  As always, Stefan Zweig displays his talent for creating realistic characters and interesting plots.

Apparently there's a Roberto Rossellini movie made in the 1950's based on this novella called <i>La Paura</i> starring Ingrid Bergman, which I'd love to see if I can find it.

Leporella

This novella is about a simple minded, hardworking, thrifty domestic servant named Crescenza, nicknamed Leporella after an operatic character by one of her employer's girlfriends.  Used to keeping her head down, working hard, minding her own business, and not expecting anything good from anyone, she becomes the housekeeper of an aristocratic married couple, where the husband earns her loyalty (and perhaps her love too), by being charming and considerate towards her.  This man finds his marriage, and his wife, unpleasant, so he embarks on a series of secret affairs whenever he gets the chance.  In her devotion to him and growing hatred for his wife, Leporella does what she can to cover for him and facilitate his happiness.  Eventually the husband finds out just how fiercely loyal she can be, and that's what destroys her.

As with other novellas and short stories of Stefan Zweig's, this one shows his talent for creating strong characters, interesting situations, and psychological insight.

Burning Secret

This is a brilliant short novel told through the eyes of a young boy, Edgar, who is on holiday with his mother at a resort.  A baron, who is a fellow guest at the hotel takes a fancy to his mother, and befriends Edgar in order to try to seduce her.  Edgar, well used to being dismissed and treated like a child by adults, is flattered that such a distinguished man would take the trouble to make friends and spend time with him as if he were an equal.  He learns a hard lesson when he realizes that the baron had an ulterior motive.  Edgar's mother also learns hard lessons when she weighs her marriage and her obligations to her family against the temptation to carry on an affair with an attractive stranger.

Amok, Star Above the Forest

I rank Amok up there with The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, my favorite Stefan Zweig stories.  As in many of his other stories, it is told second hand, through the eyes of someone who met one of the protagonists, from whom he heard it.  This tends to keep the reader at a distance from the events, as if we were being told a legend.  It's the story of a doctor who takes a job at a colonial outpost.  He falls in love with a proud, aristocratic married woman who comes to him for a secret abortion, which he won't give her, not because it is immoral, but because her demeanor was too haughty for his tastes.  He changes his mind, goes into the city in search of her, but in her desperation she had already decided on a more dangerous remedy.

It's a tragic story about those who repent too late, those whose devotion fails the people to whom they are devoted, and those who get themselves into knotty situations that they try to cover up, when a little more strength of character would have enabled them to either resolve the problem in a more honest way or avoid it altogether.

This collection also has Leporella, which I had read before, and Star Above the Forest,  a beautiful but also tragic story about hopeless, one sided love across barriers of social class that leads to despair. Obviously, this is not the book for you if you are looking for happy endings!

Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, by Stefan Zweig

A man staying at a country hotel defends the actions of a married woman also staying in the hotel who decides to run away with a younger man, abandoning her husband and children.  His defense of the woman's folly prompts a respectable elderly widow to confess a similar incident in her own past.

Like other Stefan Zweig stories I have read, this one features a story told within a story, with interesting characters, psychological insights, and unusual situations.  Well worth a read.  The atmosphere and subject matter is very similar to Dostoyevsky's <i>The Gambler</i>.

Chronicles of Avonlea, by L.M. Montgomery

This is a collection of short stories located in and around Avonlea about different people, sometimes with Anne Shirley making an appearance as a minor character.  Lucy Maud Montgomery again displays her talent for storytelling and characterization.  I found these every bit as enjoyable as the Anne of Green Gables series and pulled it off the bookshelf to revisit about as often as the Anne books.  Of the stories my two favorites are Old Lady Lloyd and The Winning of Lucinda.