The Devil

Yevgeny Irtenev is a decent, conscientious young landowner who inherits a debt-ridden estate and sets about restoring it and his family's fortunes. Practical about his physical needs, he begins a discreet affair with Stepanida, a healthy, married peasant woman on the estate, telling himself it means nothing. Then he marries Liza, a gentle woman he genuinely loves, and resolves to put the past behind him.

But the sight of Stepanida continues to torment him. What began as convenience becomes an obsession he cannot reason away, a lust that threatens his marriage, his conscience, and his sense of himself as a good man. Tolstoy renders the slow disintegration of a moral life with unsparing psychological precision.

The Devil is a late novella by Leo Tolstoy, written in 1889 and published only after his death because of its frank subject and personal resonance. Tolstoy left two different endings, and the story remains a stark, tormented meditation on desire, guilt, and the impossibility of escaping oneself.