The Russian novelist and moral philosopher Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) ranks as one of the world s great writers, and his ‘War and Peace’ has been called the greatest novel ever written. But during his long lifetime, Tolstoy also wrote enough shorter works to fill many volumes. The message in all his stories is presented with such humour that the reader hardly realises that it is strongly didactic. These stories give a snapshot of Russia and its people in the late nineteenth century.