Second Tolstoy

Ranging in scope from lengthy novellas to fables and folktales only a few pages long, Leo Tolstoy’s short fiction provides a marvelous opportunity to become closely acquainted with Russia’s great novelist. Volume 2 of the Collected Shorter Fiction reveals how Tolstoy’s growing spiritual preoccupations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces that equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power. Readers of The Death of Iván Ilých, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, Master and Man, and Hadji Murád will recognize the brilliant novelist now transfigured by his passionate quest for salvation and forgiveness. Aylmer and Louise Maude’s classic translations are supplemented by new translations by Nigel J. Cooper of six stories, including two that have never before appeared in English.

Kathryn B. Feuer offers remarkable insights into Leo Tolstoy's creative process while he wrote War and Peace. She follows the novel through countless drafts and notes, illuminating its connection to earlier, unpublished, novels and to crucial new sources, both European and Russian. A novelist herself, Feuer explores the problems of character development, narrative voice, genre, and structure that Tolstoy ultimately resolved so brilliantly.

"Edward Wasiolek, after much valuable work on Dostoevsky, has now written one of the best books on Tolstoy in recent decades. This may be in part because of his preoccupation with Tolstoy's most challenging contemporary, and the resulting sense of their unlikeness in a common pursuit. But there are other, unspeculative reasons. Few studies of Tolstoy have been so carefully pondered and so firmly organized to convince; and not so many show the flexibility and variety of its approach. Wasiolek proposes an essentially simple and consistent reading, but he advances it with subtlety and discretion."—Henry Gifford, Times Literary Supplement

'Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky' is both history and story, incorporating in its analysis of Alexander II's turbulent reign the lives and ideas of the period's great writers, thinkers and revolutionaries who made this the Golden Age of Russian literature and thought. In his combination of considerable biographical material with the presentation of the main ideas of the era's chief writers and thinkers, Walter G. Moss has written a history that is of interest not only to scholars and students of the period, but also to more general readers.

What were the consequences of Tolstoy’s unusual reliance on members of his family as source material for War and Peace? Did affection for close relatives influence depictions of these real prototypes in his fictional characters? Tolstoy used these models to consider his origins, to ponder alternative family histories, and to critique himself. Comparison of the novel and its fascinating drafts with the writer’s family history reveals increasing preferential treatment of those with greater relatedness to him: kin altruism, i.e., nepotism. This pattern helps explain many of Tolstoy’s choices amongst plot variants he considered, as well as some of the curious devices he utilizes to get readers to share his biases, such as coincidences, notions of “fate,” and aversion to incest.

Reproduction of the original: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi

Very few if any have devoted more years to practicing and teaching others to practice the precepts of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount than Leo Tolstoy. He stands apart in the history of interpretation and has had enormous influence on others and other countries. Yet, Gandhi or others often get the glory. Tolstoy is remembered as a great writer, but his religious and philosophical works are by and large unknown or disparaged, even in scholarly Tolstoyan circles. His contribution is substantially under-appreciated and misunderstood. In Second Tolstoy: The Sermon on the Mount as Theo-tactics, Steve Hickey captures the particulars and dynamics of Tolstoy's interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount from a deliberately sympathetic vantage point. Underlying this project is shared belief with Tolstoy that the Sermon on the Mount is liveable and to be lived. While from the vantage point of traditional orthodoxy Tolstoy got much wrong, there remains a lack of appreciation for what he got right--radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus. A new vocabulary is proposed to more precisely capture Tolstoyan lived theology, namely the political and social expressions of Tolstoyan Christianity, with the hope that these theories and practices will gain a wider consideration, understanding, and following.

"My aim is to present Tolstoy's work as he may have understood it himself," writes Donna Orwin. Reconstructing the intellectual and psychic struggles behind the masterpieces of his early and middle age, this major study covers the period during which he wrote The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina. Orwin uses the tools of biography, intellectual and literary history, and textual analysis to explain how Tolstoy's tormented search for moral certainty unfolded, creating fundamental differences among the great novels of the "pre-crisis" period. Distinguished by its historical emphasis, this book demonstrates that the great novelist, who had once seen a fundamental harmony between human conscience and nature's vitality, began eventually to believe in a dangerous rift between the two: during the years discussed here, Tolstoy moved gradually from a celebration of life to instruction about its moral dimensions. Paying special attention to Tolstoy's reading of Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and the Russian thinker N. N. Strakhov, Orwin also explores numerous other influences on his thought. In so doing, she shows how his philosophical and emotional conflicts changed form but continued unabated--until, with his religious conversion of 1880, he surrendered his long attempt to make sense of life through art alone.