Уесекски истории и други разкази

This volume includes the cycle “Wessex Tales”, first published in 1988. When it came out, the collection contained five stories that had appeared in periodicals. The characters and scenes in these stories are permeated with insistent realism. They display serious variety in content, form, and style – from fantasy to realism, from tragedy to comedy.

Focusing on the extraordinary nature of every story worth telling, with irony and compassion, Thomas Hardy contributed more to the development of the short story genre than anyone before him.

In this edition, besides the cycle “Wessex Tales”:

• The Three Strangers;
• A Story of 1804;
• The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion;
• The Withered Arm;
• Fellow-Townsmen;
• Interlopers at the Knap;
• The Distracted Preacher

are also included the stories:

• The Tragedy of Two Ambitions;
• A Legal Practice (Advocate’s Circuit);
• The Fiddler of the Reels;
• The Transformed Man;
• A Mere Interlude.

About the author: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) is an English naturalist writer. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, in his work he also drew inspiration from Romanticism. Like Dickens, he was strongly criticized because much of his work describes the decline of provincial society. Because the writer himself saw himself primarily as a poet, his first collection of prose came out only in 1898. But his fame and recognition came mainly for his novels, among them “Far from the Madding Crowd”, “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, “The Mayor of Casterbridge”. Most of his prose – originally published as magazine serials – is set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. It examines the fate of tragic characters struggling with their passions and social circumstances.