Tundraco's Daily Living Guide to Book Reviews

The First Distiller By Leo Tolstoy Book Jungle (2009), 48 pages ISBN 10: 1438525184 ISBN 13: 978-1438525181

Reviewed by Israel Drazin - April 8, 2010

This is a comedy by Tolstoy in six acts. An imp is assigned by the chief devil to draw Russian peasants from God and capture them for the devil. This imp is unsuccessful but other imps are victorious, such as those assigned to bedevil lawyers and married women, especially the latter.

The chief devil is very angry at the imp who promises that he will find a way to ensnare the peasants. The imp disguises itself as a laborer and helps a peasant plant and harvest enormous amounts of grain. The peasant does not know what to do with the abundance and the imp shows him how to distill the grain into alcohol. As readers could foresee, the idea of distilled alcohol soon becomes rampant among the peasants from that day until the time Tolstoy wrote this comedy, and the drunken peasants are captured by the devil.

Dr. Israel Drazin is the author of fifteen books, including a series of five volumes on the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, which he co-authors with Rabbi Dr. Stanley M. Wagner, and a series of four books on the twelfth century philosopher Moses Maimonides, the latest being Maimonides: Reason Above All, published by Gefen Publishing House, www.gefenpublishing.com. The Orthodox Union (OU) publishes daily samples of the Targum books on www.ouradio.org

The Live Corpse, by Leo Tolstoy.
A play in six parts that revolves around what happens when one man is presumed dead, his wife remarries, and then he returns - and the havoc his return causes.

The Light Shines in Darkness, by Leo Tolstoy.
In this play in five unfinished acts, Tolstoy portrays the generally negative reactions of a man's family and friends to views that Tolstoy himself advocated.