Tolstoy
A Russian Life
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station attended by the world's media. He was eighty-two years old and had lived a remarkable and long life during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history.
Born into a privileged aristocratic family, he seemed set to join the ranks of degenerate Russian noblemen, but fighting in the Crimean war alongside rank and file soldiers opened his eyes to Russia's social problems and he threw himself into teaching the peasantry to read and write. After his marriage he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both regarded as two of the greatest novels in world literature.
Rosamund Bartlett's exceptional biography of this brilliant, maddening and contrary man draws on key Russian sources, including the many fascinating new materials which have been published about Tolstoy and his legacy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coming after the centennial of Tolstoy's (1828 1910) death, this biography is worth the extra year's wait. The clich "larger than life only begins to describe Tolstoy's complexity: something of a saint, though excommunicated by the Orthodox Church; animal-rights advocate who early on hunted for sport; champion of married chastity, though he fathered a string of children; master of an estate while dressing like a peasant. Bartlett (Chekhov: Secrets from a Life) has no problem compacting all this while also scrupulously examining Tolstoy's understandably rocky relationships with family members. His revolutionary ideas on class and culture caused a serious rift with his wife, Sonya, before a series of partial and tragic reconciliations. Given the volume of Tolstoy's literary production, Bartlett wisely avoids evaluating the work beyond what is necessary to telling the life and situating it in its time. Her deep and easy familiarity with her subject and the period permits Bartlett to touch on both the thinkers and writers who engaged Tolstoy such as Rousseau, Dickens, and Schopenhauer while getting to the essence of the spiritual power that informs his work. Bartlett is particularly adept at assessing Tolstoy's impact, from the role his work played in bringing about the fall of the Romanovs, an image the Soviets highlighted, to how Tolstoy remains subversive in Russia today. 16 pages of photos, map.
