Leo Tolstoy
Distributed for Reaktion Books
224 pages
|
40 halftones
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5 x 7 3/4
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
1 An Ambitious Orphan 2 A Married Genius 3 A Lonely Leader 4 A Fugitive Celebrity References Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgements
Review Quotes
Economist
“[Tolstoy's] urge to shed distractions and commitments is one of the continuities that Zorin, a cultural historian at Oxford, traces in his beautiful account of Tolstoy's long, astonishing life . . . In an ingenious, seamless approach that distinguishes his biography from others, Zorin treats the events of Tolstoy's life and his writing as a single, indivisible whole.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Zorin provides a skeleton of nineteenth-century Russian history, but his strengths do not lie there, His governing metaphor is not sociopolitical but intensely emotional, taken from Tolstoy’s earliest memory as a swaddled infant: a helpless person irrationally bound, held down by others and desperately wanting out . . . Zorin helps us to move beyond the canonical image of Tolstoy as a fabulously fun-loving, life-affirming parent. Inventive, curious, and charismatic he certainly was.”
Sunday Independent, Dublin
"The figure that emerges from these pages is a complex one. For left-wing progressives, Tolstoy was a reactionary; while conservatives saw him as a self-destructive nihilist. A pious religious fanatic with a messianic complex might be somewhat closer to the truth. But even Christ himself would have found it impossible to live by the perfect moral order Tolstoy was always attempting to build: both in life and in art."
Donald Rayfield, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian, Queen Mary, University of London
“I know of no other biography of Tolstoy as succinct, as objective, as readable, or as thought-provoking as Zorin’s.”
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Emeritus, Stanford University
“Zorin’s life of Tolstoy marks the arrival of a new genre. In four densely documented and beautifully written chapters, Zorin has produced a masterpiece where erudition and intellectual elegance intersect.”
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