Eugene Irtenev is a young landowner with a promising future-a sensible marriage, a thriving estate, a life of respectable order. Before his wedding, he ended a brief affair with Stepanida, a beautiful peasant woman. It meant nothing. It was over. Then Stepanida returns to work on his estate. What Eugene dismissed as a youthful indulgence reawakens as an obsession that consumes his days, haunts his nights, and threatens to destroy everything he has built. He is a rational man trapped in an irrational fire. He is a husband who loves his wife-and cannot stop wanting another. Written in 1889 but published only after Tolstoy's death, The Devil is the master's most personal and terrifying work: a story not of monsters, but of the monster that sleeps inside ordinary men. Tolstoy gave it two endings-both devastating. The question is not whether Eugene will fall, but what he will destroy when he hits the ground. There is no escape. There is only the devil-and he is already inside the gate.
