"In "What For?" a Polish family suffers in the aftermath of the insurrection of 1830 to 1831, and in its suffering Tolstoy expresses his outrage at a Russian autocracy whose disastrous policies in the nineteenth century sowed the seeds of revolt in the twentieth. "Divine and Human" takes place around the time of the assassination of the emperor Alexander II in 1881.

A revolutionary terrorist, pondering the Gospels in his jail cell, is converted to a Tolstoyan understanding of true life, while an old schismatic's faith in himself is destroyed by an encounter in prison. In "Berries," Tolstoy condemns the frivolity of the 1905 revolution by contrasting the ridiculous conversations of liberals with the innocent labor of peasant children."--BOOK JACKET.