Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [129]
Maksim did not marry. He was allowed after some time to return to his homeland, to lecture in Petersburg. He founded the Party for Democratic Reform in Russia, taking a stand for constitutional monarchy. The czarists found him much too liberal. Lenin, however, denounced him as a reactionary.
Fufu practiced medicine in the Soviet Union, dying there in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century. She had no interest in mathematics, so she said.
Sophia’s name has been given to a crater on the moon.
Acknowledgments
I discovered Sophia Kovalevsky (“Too Much Happiness”) while searching for something else in the Britannica one day. The combination of novelist and mathematician immediately caught my interest, and I began to read everything about her I could find. One book enthralled me beyond all others, and so I must record my indebtedness, my immense gratitude, to the author of Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1983), Don H. Kennedy, and his wife, Nina, a collateral descendent of Sophia’s, who provided quantities of texts translated from the Russian, including portions of Sophia’s diaries, letters and numerous other writings.
I have limited my story to the days leading up to Sophia’s death, with flashbacks to her earlier life. But I do urge anybody interested to read the Kennedys’ book, which presents such historical and mathematical riches.
June 2009
Alice Munro
Clinton, Ontario
Canada
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous collections of stories—Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and a Selected Stories. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, and the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2009 by Alice Munro
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Society of Authors for permission to reprint “Away” from The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (London: Faber, 1969). Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Munro, Alice.
Too much happiness : stories / by Alice Munro. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27323-9
I. Title.
PR9199.3.M8A6 2009
813′.54—dc22 2009020010
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