The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

TOLSTOY RETURNED to his full splendor in the novella Hadji Murat, which he worked on for some eight years, and chose not to publish.

I have written about Hadji Murat at some length once before in my book The Western Canon (1994). Probably I read it first, in the Maude translation, in about 1953. I have been thinking about it for almost two-thirds of a century, and it still seems to me the best story in the world. Fortunately, I have just reread it in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2009), and, against all expectation, it seems even better than I remember.