One of Tolstoy's most famous stories - deservedly

After the Ball is no doubt one of Tolstoy's best-known, most widely anthologized short stories, not only because it's excellent but also because, nearly unique for Tolstoy, it's actually short - just a few pages and concerning a single action, a single evening. A narrator opens by telling a group of friends that he believes our lives aren't determined by the forces of society or by our internal characters but by chance - and then, in my view, the story he tells goes on to disprove his point: he describes the beautiful woman he was once in love with, an evening of ballroom dancing at which they seemed to be madly in love with one another, at one point in the evening she takes a turn on the floor with her father, an elegant and tall military man who leads her effectively though his great dancing days are over, they make a striking couple; after the ball, the narrator goes home, excited, can't sleep, goes out for a walk, heads toward the girl's home, where he sees a military assemblage as a shirtless soldier, a deserter, walks through a gauntlet of men who beat him bloody with rods - the elegant father leads the man through the gauntlet, cool and impervious, and even beats a soldier who hits the man too lightly. This vision - very strange and unlikely, more like a dream or a revelation (why would this be happening in the predawn?) - lead to the loss of his affection for the girl and a different path in life. A strange story, suggesting that in seeing the cruelty of the father he saw an element of personality never evident to him before, that she would be cruel, heartless - but of course that suggests that her life would not be determined by chance but entirely by the circumstances of her birth and upbringing, right? As with many of Tolstoy's best stories (and in his great novels) a scene is captured and depicted with such startling vividness that it becomes larger than the work itself: an episode in a life can determine a whole life, even if the characters do not fully comprehend why that's so.