A new translation into modern American English directly from the original Russian manuscript. This edition contains an Afterword by the translator, a timeline of Tolstoy's life and works, and a glossary of philosophic terminology used throughout Tolstoy's literature and philosophy. Written between 1861-1862 and published after his death by his estate in 1911, Tolstoy never finished this novel about peasant life. These three stories remain from the would-be novel. Tolstoy had this idea in August 1860, possibly due to his interaction with the peasant woman Aksinija Basykina. The Aksiniya Model is also used as the protagonist Malanja Rodionovna in the idyll and the peasant Stepanida Petschnikova in the devil . These three fragments are written from an omniscient first-person narrator. The title references an "Idyll", which is a descriptive poem of rural life, written in the style of Theocritus's short pastoral poems, the Idylls. His idylls describe common, everyday scene from life, and Tolstoy here mimics this narrative form.