Tolstoy: A Russian Life

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.

Rosamund Bartlett is the author of the acclaimed biography Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. An authority on Russian cultural history, she has also achieved renown as a translator of Chekhov's stories and letters. Her other books include Wagner and Russia and Shostakovich in Context. Tolstoy: A Life is her most recent work.

The extraordinary character of the giant is captured better by Bartlett than by any previous biographer * Spectator * Superbly readable and, in contrast to some earlier biographies, treats the great novelist's sometimes strange enthusiasms and obsessions sympathetically and seriously. -- Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury * Mail on Sunday Books of the Year * Conveys Tolstoy to me more vividly than any biography I have read. * Financial Times * 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 highly accessible and intelligent... neat and illuminating...Bartlett's biography is worth tackling for four qualities alone. The first is her insight into the many contradictions of Tolstoy's character... Its second merit is the way Bartlett places Tolstoy in the much wider cultural context... The third great strength of Bartlett's biography is the weight she gives both to his philosophical writings, and to his social activism, which is a salutary corrective to those, including his Soviet critics, who concentrate on the great novels to the exclusion of all else... The fourth distinguishing feature, and a considerable one, is Bartlett's relatively sympathetic treatment of the women in Tolstoy's life... bonus throughout is Bartlett's pleasant, unimposing style -- Mary Dejevsky * Independent * In the centenary of Leo Tolstoy's death, it was a great pleasure to read Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstoy: A Russian Life...an accessible and scholarly biography of the troubled master of realist fiction which conjures the splendid image of him wobbling around on a bicycle -- Richard Godwin * Evening Standard Books of the Year * engaging... In her revelations about the immense difficulties of producing the definitive Collected Works (a task that, under Soviet Communism, proved almost impossible) and in her elucidation of the suppression of Tolstoy's spiritual influence, 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 * Daily Telegraph * a splendidly lucid and sympathetic biography -- Scotsman * Alan Massie * Impressive * Independent on Sunday Books of the Year *