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by Rosamund Bartlett (Author)
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“Magisterial sweep and scale.”—The Independent (UK)
In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, with a growing international following, and more revered than the tsar. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy had spent his life rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state.
In this, the first biography of Tolstoy in more than twenty years, Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including much fascinating material made available since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived. Above all, Bartett gives us an eloquent portrait of the brilliant, maddening, and contrary man who has once again been discovered by a new generation of readers.
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Bonus Content: Images from Tolstoy
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Tolstoy and his Starley Rover Bicycle, 1895. Credit: Tolstoi: Dokumenty. Rukopisi. Fotografi, Moscow, 1995 The fourth draft of the opening of Anna Karenina, 1873 • Credit: Tolstoi: Dokumenty. Rukopisi. Fotografi, Moscow, 1995
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Rosamund Bartlett
Q: What drew you to Tolstoy?
A: Apart from a lifetime fascination with the great Russian writers at the personal and professional level, my interest was spurred by having previously written a biography of Chekhov and translated his stories and letters. One cannot avoid noticing Chekhov’s reverence for Tolstoy as a writer, thinker, and social activist—it crops up in numerous remarkable letters he wrote both before and after he became friends with the great writer. For Chekhov, Tolstoy was the most important person in Russia, and not just as an artist and father figure, but as a moral authority. I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of what it was that made Chekhov, and indeed the majority of the Russian population, look up to Tolstoy as a spiritual leader at the end of the nineteenth century, when his stature was greater than that of the tsar.
Q: Why write a new biography of Tolstoy now?
A: There are three main reasons. First, the centenary of Tolstoy’s death in November 2010 provided a great opportunity to assess his legacy, and second, there are surprisingly few other English-language biographies of Tolstoy. Third, and most important, the arrival of perestroika and glasnost, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, changed fundamentally and irrevocably how we write about Russia, including its great writers. Despite his worldwide fame as a novelist, Tolstoy was, like all other Russian writers, posthumously subject to ideological control, and the suppression of his monumental spiritual legacy after 1917 resulted in a skewed picture of his life. The relaxation of censorship introduced by Gorbachev, however, opened the floodgates to a mass of new material, upon which this biography draws extensively.
Q: What is different about your biography?
A: Today we have much more objective information about Tolstoy himself and about his family, his many followers, the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (which excommunicated him in 1901), and the tsarist government. We can construct a much fuller and more accurate picture of Tolstoy’s life and, just as important, place it in a detailed cultural context. Moreover, this biography is written from Tolstoy’s own point of view, rather than that of the typical Anglophone reader. So instead of focusing most attention on the seventeen-year-period in which War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written, it places a great deal of emphasis on the last thirty years of Tolstoy’s life, when he became a social and religious crusader.
Q: Why did you choose the subtitle "A Russian Life"?
A: I see Tolstoy as a genius who embodied much of the Russian experience in all its intense and passionate extremes. Using the particular structure of my biography, I wanted to show that Tolstoy, in the course of his eighty-two years, actually lived many lives, most of which were deeply Russian archetypes: the reckless gambler, the repentant nobleman, the holy fool, the admired elder, the nihilist, and others.
Q: How did translating Tolstoy’s work inform the biography?
A: When I wrote my biography of Chekhov, I found it very fruitful to translate some of his greatest short stories at the same time. In fact, most of my inspiration for writing Chekhov’s biography came from the experience of engaging closely with the rhythms and cadences of his prose. I wanted to have the same experience with Tolstoy, and indeed I found that whatever insights I have of Tolstoy’s personality probably came from having completed half of my translation of Anna Karenina before embarking on my biography of its author. Translating Tolstoy means getting to know him from the inside.
Q:What were you most surprised to learn in your research?
A: I had not expected to discover how much love and devotion Tolstoy poured into his educational work, both as a founder of schools for illiterate peasantry in which he himself taught, and as the author of a pioneering primer designed to help all Russian children learn to read and write. Tolstoy’s educational ideas were rather unorthodox and anarchic, like all his thinking, but deeply original, and conceived with the Russian culture and the Russian language in mind. It is extraordinary to consider that after finishing the Homeric epic of War and Peace, Tolstoy literally went back to the letters of the alphabet.
Q:You write extensively about Tolstoy as a political figure in his time, but what is important to note about his legacy?
A: I was greatly surprised to discover the extent of Tolstoy’s importance as a political figure in Russia, beginning in the 1860s, before he wrote War and Peace, and culminating with the international media event of his death in 1910. But the story does not end there. In my epilogue, I discuss what happened to Tolstoy and his artistic and religious legacy after 1917—a story that has much to do with Russia’s signal failure to mark the centenary of his death in 2010 in any serious way, and which is crucial to our understanding of the man. In addition, Tolstoy’s enormous body of spiritual writings was only published once, in the complete collected works, with a tiny print run, so generations of Russians grew up in the twentieth century without any knowledge of them. Today Tolstoy remains a threat to the Russian establishment because of his anarchic ideas and his never-ending quest for truth.
Q:What’s the one thing you want everyone to know about Tolstoy?
A: Tolstoy may not have been as endearing a man as Chekhov, nor as compassionate and open as an artist, but he deserves our admiration for his fearless courage in standing up to a corrupt regime and refusing to be silent about its moral failures. He also fully deserves his reputation as one of the world’s great novelists for creating all those unforgettable characters with such closely observed psychological detail. As in all great works of art, their experiences transcend time and place, and articulate what it is to be human. A novel like War and Peace is universal and timeless, and offers rich rewards on a second, third, and fourth reading.
Review
Longlisted for the UK's BBC Samuel Johnson Prize
"[Bartlett's] deep and easy familiarity with her subject and the period permits Bartlett to touch on both the thinkers and writers who engaged Tolstoy...while getting to the essence of the spiritual power that informs his work. Bartlett is particularly adept at assessing Tolstoy's impact..."
-Publishers Weekly, starred
"A rich, complex life told in rich, complex prose."
-Kirkus, starred
"Bartlett’s book is an exemplary literary biography."
-Library Journal, starred
"[Bartlett's]Tolstoy biography should become the first resort for everyone drawn to its titanic subject."
-Booklist, starred
"Rosamund Bartlett's new life of Tolstoy is a splendid book -- immensely readable, full of fresh details, and often quite brilliant in its perceptiveness about the greatest of Russian writers, and one of the stars in the western firmament. This biography has the sweep and vividness of literature itself, and I strongly recommend it."
-Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
"It is difficult as a reader to take in the sheer scale and extent of Tolstoy’s interest and achievement. For the biographer to put all this into less than 500 pages is an achievement in itself. But Bartlett never seems hurried and she gives herself time to paint the scene for us, bringing the scent of Russian earth and grass to the nostrils."
-Financial Times (UK)
"The extraordinary character of the giant is captured better by Bartlett than by any previous biographer, and this is partly because she knows Russia so well... Superbly well written."
-Spectator (UK)
From the Inside Flap
“Magisterial sweep and scale.”—The Independent (UK)
In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, with a growing international following, and more revered than the tsar. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy had spent his life rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state.
In this, the first biography of Tolstoy in twenty years, Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including much fascinating material made available since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived. Above all, Bartett gives us an eloquent portrait of the brilliant, maddening, and contrary man who has once again been discovered by a new generation of readers.
From the Back Cover
Praise for TOLSTOY
"Rosamund Bartlett's new biography conveys Tolstoy to me more vividly than any biography I have read."—A. N. Wilson, Financial Times
"A splendid book—immensely readable, full of fresh details, and often quite brilliant in its perceptiveness about the greatest of Russian writers, and one of the stars in the Western firmament. This biography has the sweep and vividness of literature itself, and I strongly recommend it."—Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
"Bartlett reminds us not only that the great man is not so very long dead, but also that his myth is being made and remade even now."—Claire Messud, The Telegraph (UK)
"Worth the wait . . . Her deep and easy familiarity with her subject and the period permits Bartlett to touch on both the thinkers and writers who engaged Tolstoy, while getting to the essence of the spiritual power that informs his work.”—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"An epic biography that does justice to an epic figure."—Library Journal (starred)
"Should become the first resort for everyone drawn to its titanic subject."—Booklist (starred)
"A rich, complex life told in rich, complex prose."—Kirkus (starred)
About the Author
Rosamund Bartlett's previous books include Wagner and Russia and the acclaimed Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. An authority on Russian cultural history, she has also achieved renown as a translator of Chekhov.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
In January 1895, deep in the heart of the Russian winter, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy left Moscow to go and spend a few days with some old friends at their country estate. He had just experienced another fracas with his wife over the publication of a new story, he felt suffocated in the city, and he wanted to clear his head by putting on his old leather coat and fur hat and going for some long walks in the clear, frosty air, far away from people and buildings. His hosts had taken care to clear the paths on their property, but Tolstoy did not like walking on well-ordered paths. Even in his late sixties he preferred tramping in the wilds, so he invariably ventured out past the garden fence and strode off into the deep snow, in whichever direction his gaze took him. Some of the younger members of the household had the idea of following in his footsteps one evening, but they soon had to give up when they saw how great was the distance between the holes left in the soft snow by his felt boots.1
The sensation of not being able to keep up was one commonly felt by Tolstoy’s contemporaries, as he left giant footprints in every area of his life. After racking up enormous gambling debts as a young man, during which time he conceived and failed to live up to wildly ambitious ideals, he turned to writing extremely long novels and fathering a large number of children. When he went out riding with his sons, he habitually went at such a fast pace they could barely keep up with him. Then he became moral leader to the nation, and one of the world’s most famous and influential men. A tendency towards the grand scale has been a markedly Russian characteristic ever since the times of Ivan the Terrible, who created an enormous multi-ethnic empire by conquering three Mongol Khanates in the sixteenth century. Peter the Great cemented the tradition by making space the defining feature of his new capital of St Petersburg which arose in record time out of the Finnish marshes. By the time Catherine the Great died at the end of the eighteenth century, Russia had also become immensely wealthy. Its aristocrats were able to build lavish palaces and assemble extravagant art collections far grander than their Western counterparts, with lifestyles to match. But Russia’s poverty was also on a grand scale, perpetuated by an inhumane caste system in which a tiny minority of Westernised nobility ruled over a fettered serf population made to live in degrading conditions. Tolstoy was both a product of this culture and perhaps its most vivid expression.
Many people who knew Tolstoy noticed his hyper-sensitivity. He was like litmus paper in his acute receptivity to minute gradations of physical and emotional experience, and it was his unparalleled ability to observe and articulate these ever-changing details of human behaviour in his creative works that makes his prose so thrilling to read. The consciousness of his characters is at once particular and universal. Tolstoy was also hyper-sensitive in another way, for he embodied at different times of his life a myriad Russian archetypes, from the ‘repentant nobleman’ to the ‘holy fool’. Only Russia could have produced a writer like Tolstoy, but only Tolstoy could be likened in almost the same breath to both a tsar and a peasant. From the time that he was born into the aristocratic Tolstoy family in the idyllic surroundings of his ancestral home at Yasnaya Polyana to the day that he left it for the last time at the age of eighty-two, Tolstoy lived a profoundly Russian life. He began to be identified with his country soon after he published his national epic War and Peace when he was in still his thirties. Later on, he was equated with Ilya Muromets, the most famous Russian bogatyr – a semi-mythical medieval warrior who lay at home on the brick stove until he was thirty-three – then went on to perform great feats defending the realm. Ilya Muromets is Russia’s traditional symbol of physical and spiritual strength. Tolstoy was also synonymous with Russia in the eyes of many of his foreign admirers. ‘He is as much part of Russia, as significant of Russian character, as prophetic of Russian development, as the Kremlin itself,’ wrote the liberal British politician Sir Henry Norman soon after visiting Tolstoy in 1901.2 For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, meanwhile, Tolstoy had ‘no face of his own; he possesses the face of the Russian people, because in him the whole of Russia lives and breathes’.3
Tolstoy lived a Russian life, and he lived many more lives than most other Russians, exhibiting both the ‘natural dionysism’ and ‘Christian asceticism’ which the philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev defines as characteristic of the Russian people.4 First of all he lived the life of his privileged class, educated by private foreign tutors and waited on by serfs. He became a wealthy landowner at the age of nineteen, and immediately began exhibiting Russian ‘maximalist’ tendencies by squandering his inheritance on gypsy singers and gambling. Whole villages were sold off to pay his debts, followed by his house. Tolstoy also lived up to the reputation of the depraved Russian landowner by taking advantage of his serf girls, then assumed another classic identity of the Russian noble: he became an army officer. For most of his comrades-in-arms the next step was retirement to the country estate, but Tolstoy became a writer – the most promising young writer of his generation. It was at this point that he started showing signs of latent anarchism: he did not want to belong to any particular literary fraternity, and soon alienated most of his fellow writers with his eccentric views and combative nature. Turgenev disappointed him by failing to take writing as seriously as he did, and for being too enslaved to western Europe. Turgenev’s creative work was as deeply bound up with Russia as Tolstoy’s was, but he lived in Paris. Tolstoy made two visits abroad during his lifetime, but he was tied to Russia body and soul.
As he matured under the influence of the writers and philosophers who shaped his ideas, Tolstoy inevitably became a member of the intelligentsia, the peculiarly Russian class of people united by their education and usually critical stance towards their government. The deep guilt he now felt before the Russian peasantry, furthermore, made him a repentant nobleman, ashamed at his complicity in the immoral institution of serfdom. Like the Populists, Tolstoy began to see the peasants as Russia’s best class, and her future, and around the time that serfdom was finally abolished he threw himself into teaching village children how to read and write. But he was mercurial, and a year later abandoned his growing network of unconventional schools to get married and start a family. The emotional stability provided by his devoted wife Sofya (‘Sonya’) Bers enabled him next to become Russia’s Homer: War and Peace was written at the happiest time in his life.
Tolstoy’s overactive conscience would not allow him to continue along the path of great novelist, and in the first half of the 1870s he went back to education. This time he devised his own system for teaching Russian children from all backgrounds how to read and write, by putting together an ABC and several reading primers. He taught himself Greek, then produced his own simplified translations of Aesop’s fables, as well as stories of his own, a compilation of tales about Russian bogatyrs and extracts from sacred readings. The Yasnaya Polyana school was reopened, with some of the elder Tolstoy children as teachers. Tolstoy was more of a father during these years than at any other time, and he took his family off to his newly acquired estate on the Samaran steppe for an unorthodox summer holiday amongst Bashkirs and horses. He revelled in the raw, primitive lifestyle, even if his wife did not.
In the second half of the 1870s everything began to unravel. In 1873, the year in which he began Anna Karenina, Tolstoy first spoke out on behalf of the impoverished peasantry by appealing nationwide for help in the face of impending famine. Anna Karenina, set in contemporary Russia, reflects Tolstoy’s own search for meaning in the face of depression and thoughts of death. Initially, he found meaning in religious faith and became one of the millions of pilgrims criss-crossing the Russian land on their way to visit its hallowed monasteries. Like many fellow intellectuals, Tolstoy was drawn to the Elders of the Optina Pustyn Monastery – monks who had distanced themselves from the official ecclesiastical hierarchy by resurrecting the ascetic traditions of the early Church Fathers, and who were revered for their spiritual wisdom. He found it was the peasants who had more wisdom to impart, however, and the next time he went to Optina Pustyn, he walked there, dressed in peasant clothes and bast shoes like a Strannik (‘wanderer’). The Stranniks were a sect who spent their lives walking in pilgrimage from one monastery to another, living on alms. The nomadic spirit runs deep in Russia, and Tolstoy increasingly hankered as time went on to join their ranks. He had long ago started dressing like a peasant, but he soon wanted to dispense with money and private property altogether.
From extreme piety Tolstoy went to extreme nihilism. At the end of the 1870s he began to see the light, and he set down his spiritual journey in a work which came to be known as his Confession. He also undertook a critical investigation of Russian Orthodox theology, and produced a ‘new, improved’ translation of the Gospels. Over the course of the 1880s he became an apostle for the Christian teaching which emerged from his root-and-branch review of the original sources, and at the same time his newfound faith compelled him to speak out against the immorality he now saw in all state institutions, from the monarchy downwards. Home life now became very strained, particularly after Tolstoy renounced the copyright on all his new writings and gave away all his property to his family. He discovered kindred spirits amongst the unofficial sectarian faiths which proliferated across Russia, whose followers were mostly peasants, and gradually became the leader of a new sectarian faith, although his followers were mostly conscience-stricken gentry like himself. These ‘Tolstoyans’ sometimes vied with each other to lead the most morally pure life, giving up money and property, living by the sweat of their brow and treating everyone as their ‘brother’. Thus one zealous Tolstoyan even gave up his kaftan, hat and bast shoes one summer, glad to be no longer a slave to his personal possessions.5
By the 1890s Tolstoy had become the most famous man in Russia, celebrated for a number of compellingly written and explosive tracts setting out his views on Christianity, the Orthodox Church and the Russian government, which were read all the more avidly for having been banned: they circulated very successfully in samizdat. It was when Tolstoy spearheaded the relief effort during the widespread famine of 1892 that his position as Russia’s greatest moral authority became unassailable. The result was a constant stream of visitors at his front door in Moscow, many of whom simply wanted to shake his hand. One of them was the twenty-three-year-old Sergey Diaghilev, who with characteristic chutzpah turned up one day with his cousin, and immediately noticed the incongruity of Tolstoy’s peasant dress and ‘gentlemanly way of behaving and speaking’. Tolstoy had come for a rest from the famine-relief work he had been doing in Ryazan province, and talked to the sophisticated young aesthetes from St Petersburg about soup kitchens. Diaghilev shared his impressions with his stepmother:
When we got out into the street, our first words were exclamations: ‘But he’s a saint, he’s really a saint!’ We were so moved we almost wept. There was something inexpressibly sincere, touching and holy in the whole person of the great man. It’s funny that we could smell his beard for a long time, which we had touched as we embraced him …6
Tolstoy received thousands of visitors in the last decades of his life, and he had a reputation for rarely turning anyone away. Before long, he became known as the ‘Elder of Yasnaya Polyana’.
Tolstoy received over 50,000 letters during his lifetime, 9,000 of which came from abroad. With the help of the eminence grise of the Tolstoyan movement, Vladimir Chertkov, who found him secretaries, he did his best to answer as many as he could (there are 8,500 letters printed in his Collected Works, and there must have been many more).7 Chertkov was the scion of a distinguished noble family who became Tolstoy’s trusted friend, and the chief publisher of his late writings. Tolstoy’s family often felt neglected. It was his wife Sonya who bore the brunt of domestic duties, almost as a single parent of their eight children, some of whom were very unruly. She also had the demanding job of publishing her husband’s old writings, which guaranteed the family some income, even if her profitable enterprise caused him pain. It was not easy being a member of Tolstoy’s family. Sonya wrote to her husband in 1892: ‘Tanya told someone in Moscow, “I’m so tired of being the daughter of a famous father”. And I’m tired of being the wife of a famous husband, I can tell you!’8
Tolstoy’s fame increased further when he published his last novel Resurrection in order to aid the members of the Dukhobor sect to emigrate to Canada, where they could practise their beliefs freely and without persecution. Finally exasperated by Tolstoy’s blistering satire of a mass in one of its chapters, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him, and so Tolstoy joined the illustrious ranks of Russian apostates – rebels like Stenka Razin and Emelyan Pugachev. Because of his fame, Tolstoy was able to do what few others in Russia could: speak out. The government was powerless to stop him, as it knew there would be international outrage if he was either arrested or exiled. Tolstoy took advantage of the situation by behaving like a ‘holy fool’ so that he could speak frankly to the Tsar about his failure as a national leader. There was a widespread feeling in Russia in the last decade of Tolstoy’s life that he was the ‘real’ Tsar.
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Product details
Hardcover: 544 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First edition (November 8, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780151014385
ISBN-13: 978-0151014385
ASIN: 0151014388
Product Dimensions: 2 x 6.8 x 10 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
Customer Reviews: 4.2 out of 5 stars81 customer ratings
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,012,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Top international reviews
Mr. D. James
5.0 out of 5 stars The People's TsarReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 15, 2015
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Bartlett, Rosamund. Tolstoy: A Russian Life
This book is not an exegesis of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, but a meticulously detailed life of Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy, the man. A glance at Bartlett’s Select Bibliography runs to 9 pages of small print, embracing Tolstoy’s correspondence, diaries and family memoirs. The novels themselves are overshadowed by the sheer volume of letters and political and moral treatises to which the author devoted the majority of his latter years. Tolstoy was not just a writer of novels, although for most of his readers it is by them that he is remembered today, but a social and moral reformer. From his aristocratic background he gradually renounced all worldly pleasures and saw his masterpieces as trivial and worthless. He wanted to make the world a better place and by doing this peacefully though his own example he gained the respect of thousands in many lands, especially in the West, but also aroused the anger of the Russian Orthodox church and the ruling class. From his native Yasnaya Polyana, a relatively small estate some 300 miles south-east of Moscow, he reached out to hundreds of thousands, becoming intimate with Englishmen, Europeans, Americans and Japanese, many of whom travelled miles just to shake him by the hand.
Although packed with detailed analyses of Tolstoy’s clashes with authority, resulting finally in his excommunication from the Church, and his being dubbed a devil incarnate by the influential Father Ioann for teaching that Christ was not divine. As Rosamund Bartlett explains, ‘Father Ioann was seen as the pastor of the people, whereas Tolstoy was worshipped more by the intelligentsia.’ Both aspired to an ascetic ideal, both were strict vegetarians and puritans, setting the example by their own lives. When Tolstoy fell seriously ill in 1902 the Holy Synod, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Censorship Committee feared that his death would spark a revolution. Many of Tolstoy’s works were too much for government and clergy, but he pressed on and had them published abroad. Thus he harangued the clergy in the Free Word Press in 1903: ‘You know that what you teach about the creation of the world, about the inspiration of the Bible by God, and much else is not true. How then can you teach it to little children and to ignorant adults who look to you for true enlightenment?’
Bartlett’s comprehensive study is both highly readable and informative, replete with illustrations of the family and friends of a man whose life became as close as possible to that of Christ in following the Jesuitical path of poverty, service and humility, but sheered of any doctrinal trimmings.
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Knowlton
3.0 out of 5 stars A useful modern biography of a towering figure in European cultural history.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 15, 2019
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Many years ago I read Henri Troyat's acclaimed biography of Tolstoy and I enjoyed this modern addition to Tolstoy scholarship. Rosamund Bartlett has also written an interesting biography of Tolstoy's friend Chekhov and she has made a good new translation of Anna Karenina. But be warned: the Kindle edition of Tolstoy: A Russian Life has masses of misprints, often several on a single page. I don't think I had previously realised that misprints (they are not just "typos"), if sufficiently frequent can mar one's reading pleasure.
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King Brosby
4.0 out of 5 stars VERY SOLID LIFE OF COUNT LEO TOLSTOYReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2011
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This is a life (450 pages) of Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910 - aristocrat, soldier, novelist, farmer, thinker, social campaigner) with an epilogue about his influence in Russia since 1910 (and the Soviet attitude to Tolstoyanism). It's by Rosamund Bartlett, an expert on Russian cultural history and Fellow of King's College (London).
It's about the development of key books e.g., "Anna Karenina" and "ABC" (an educational text) but also about Tolstoy as educationalist and thinker. The boldness and range of his religious/philosophical thinking about how to live was tremendous. A centrepiece was "The Gospel in Brief" (based on the Sermon on The Mount) which - a radical re-examination of Christianity - drew conclusions he lived by. He became a non-violent pacifist, but also anti-state, anti-militarist and arguably anarchist, which explains why the Soviets and Orthodox church were so hostile.
Dr Bartlett's thorough book is well-researched , but I'd have liked more opinions (in addition to chronology) about the literature and philosophy; e.g., why is Anna Karenina so highly regarded and writers e.g., Chekhov in awe, ... what are the merits/demerits of Tolstoy's "anarchistic" ideas? Was he right? Perhaps such discussion could have been in footnotes? Perhaps Dr Bartlett felt such judgements were provided by others in the literature.
The portrayal of (Tolstoy's wife) Sophia - central but in shadow - seemed understated; perhaps the marriage was a drama (tensions of a woman married to a radical genius) Dr Bartlett didn`t want to major on. Tolstoy and Sophia married in 1862 when she was 18 (he 34), she bore 13 children (8 survived childhood), and died 1919 at Yasnaya Polyana (the Tolstoy estate south of Moscow). She attempted suicide when told (at the end of his life) Tolstoy had left Yasnaya Polyana.
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Tony W
5.0 out of 5 stars In 19th Century Russia, was anyone more influential than Tolstoy?Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 23, 2016
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Before reading this book I read Rosamund Bartlett's translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina - first read many years ago in Russian. It was just excellent and a joy to read - not least with all its amplifying notes. This book, which precedes the translation of Anna Karenina, shows the same meticulous attention and deep understanding of all things Russian and especially 19th century Russia. What a gifted man Tolstoy was. Imagine a modern writer taking 6 years to write War and Peace! Rosamund describes his opposition to serfdom and the way he took a lead in giving them freedom and some access to education. Nothing is omitted - his long period of "wild oats", his search for the "right" wife .......just a week engaged before the wedding and then 13 children ........ his spiritual journey, including his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. Altogether a remarkable man and a biography worthy of him.
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Drejem
4.0 out of 5 stars An incredible story-well toldReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2013
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I found this biography very well researched and especially interesting as it devotes a great deal of space to Tolstoy's writings on religion, spirituality and pacifism. I have read other biographies of this great soul- Ernest Simmons's for example- but they focussed nearly exclusively on Tolstoy's literary output. The fact that the last third of Tolstoy's life was devoted mainly to living out his own philosophy of life cannot be dismissed as an uninteresting aberration and faintly embarrassing deviation by a literary giant. Bartlett has met this challenge directly, and treats Tolstoy's philosophy with the respect and seriousness it deserves. With that said, my only point of criticism with the biography is the rather turgid prose, which does not quite match up to the grandeur of the subject and his prodigious life and remarkable achievements- both literary and in inventing a new way of life that should have special resonance for us in these times.
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Tolstoy: A Russian Life
Rosamund Bartlett
“Magisterial sweep and scale.”—The Independent (UK)In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, with a growing international following, and more revered than the tsar. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy had spent his life rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state.In this, the first biography of Tolstoy in more than twenty years, Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including much fascinating material made available since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved and the turbulent times in which he lived. Above all, Bartett gives us an eloquent portrait of the brilliant, maddening, and contrary man who has once again been discovered by a new generation of readers.$6.66 (USD)
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Release date: 2011
Format: EPUB
Size: 6.15 MB
Language: English
Pages: 560
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