Description

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Best known today as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Count Leo Tolstoy also is acknowledged as a skilled playwright. His five-act drama The Power of Darkness offers a cold and unsparing look at Russian peasant life that illustrates the costs of pursuing personal desires rather than the dictates of morality. The grimly realistic tragedy is based on a real incident, centering on a peasant's confession to a party of wedding guests of his participation in a series of horrific crimes that range from adultery and murder to infanticide.
Tolstoy's moving portrait of a class enslaved by poverty and ignorance was written in 1886, but its performance was suppressed by Russian authorities until 1902. A 1904 version, performed in New York in Yiddish, marked the first successful production of a play by Tolstoy in the United States.

About the Author

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Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was one of the greatest figures in Russian and world literature, author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and many other novels, short stories, and autobiographical and philosophical works. Dover also publishes several of his novels and story collections. Interpreters Aylmer Maude (1858-1938) and Louise Maude (1855-1939) met and married in Russia and were close friends of the author, who particularly valued their knowledge of Russian and the quality of their English translations. Aylmer Maude wrote a biography of Tolstoy, originally published in 1902.