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Book A Quest for a Non violent Russia

Download or read book A Quest for a Non violent Russia written by Alexander Fodor and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Book Tolstoy

Download or read book Tolstoy written by Rosamund Bartlett and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of the brilliant author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina “should become the first resort for everyone drawn to its titanic subject” (Booklist, starred review). 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, more revered than the tsar, with a growing international following. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy spent his existence rebelling against not only conventional ideas about literature and art but also traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state. In “an epic biography that does justice to an epic figure,” Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including fascinating material that has only become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union (Library Journal, starred review). 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.

Book Tolstoy s Pacifism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Colm McKeogh
  • Publisher : Cambria Press
  • Release : 2009
  • ISBN : 1604976349
  • Pages : 252 pages

Download or read book Tolstoy s Pacifism written by Colm McKeogh and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was the most influential, challenging, and provocative pacifist of his generation. The most famous person alive at the dawn of the twentieth century, his international stature came not only from his great novels but from his rejection of violence and the state. Tolstoy was a strict pacifist in the last three decades of his life, and wrote at length on a central issue of politics, namely, the use of violence to maintain order, to promote justice, and to ensure the survival of society, civilization, and the human species. He unreservedly rejected the use of physical force to these or any ends. Tolstoy was a religious pacifist rather than an ethical or political one. His pacifism was rooted not in a moral doctrine or political theory but in his straightforward reading of the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. Despite his fame, Tolstoy's pacifism remains insufficiently studied. A hundred years after his death, Tolstoy is a figure unfamiliar in political science, encountered, if at all, as the author of hortatory quotations on the wrongness of political violence or of allegiance to the state. This work of political science offers an account of Leo Tolstoy as a Christian thinker on political violence. It presents Tolstoy's pacifism as a striking case of the impact of religious idealism on political attitudes. The Russian novelist offers an instructive case study in Christian pacifism and in the attractions and failings of strict, literalist, and simplistic religious approaches to the many and complex issues of politics. Today, the political implications of religious fundamentalism, scriptural literalism, and Christian faith are very much live issues and the contemporary discussion of them should not omit pacifism. In this first study of Tolstoy's pacifism by a political scientist, Colm McKeogh unravels the complexities of Tolstoy's writings on Christianity and political violence. This work serves scholars of political science by bringing together relevant extracts from Tolstoy's writings and providing a succinct treatment of the core political issues. It establishes that Tolstoy's stance is primarily one of non-violence rather than non-resistance. McKeogh's work then assesses the internal consistency of Tolstoy's pacifism, its grounding in the Gospels and Christian tradition, its political and anti-political implications, and the meaning in life that it offers. It finds that Tolstoy does great service to the pacifist cause (with his defense of peace as close to the centre of Christ's message) and yet harm to it too (by divorcing peace from the love that is even more central to Christ's message). Tolstoy's political and religious legacy is not that of a prophet, a social activist, a moral reformer, a political idealist or pacifist theorist but that of a dissident. Tolstoy stands as one of the great dissidents of twentieth-century Russia, a man who condemned the system utterly and who refused to perform any act that could be construed as compromising with it. He left behind a powerful statement of the urgent human need to connect our daily living to a deep and fulfilling conception of the meaning of life. Tolstoy's Pacifism is important for political science, Christian ethics, literature, and Russian collections.

Book Tolstoy s Quest for God

Download or read book Tolstoy s Quest for God written by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religious dimension of Tolstoy's life is usually associated with his later years following his renunciation of art. In this volume, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere demonstrates instead that Tolstoy was preoccupied with a quest for God throughout all of his adult life. Although renowned as the author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and other literary works, and for his activism on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden of Russia, Tolstoy himself was concerned primarily with achieving personal union with God.Tolstoy suffered from periodic bouts of depression which brought his creative life to a standstill, and which intensified his need to find comfort in the embrace of a personal God. At times he was in such psychic pain he wanted to die. Yet Tolstoy felt that he deserved to suffer, and he learned to welcome suffering in masochistic fashion. Rancour-Laferriere locates the psychological underpinnings of Tolstoy's suffering in a bipolar illness that led him actively to seek suffering and self-humiliation in the Russian tradition of holy foolishness. With voluntary suffering, and Jesus Christ as his model, Tolstoy advocated nonresistance to evil, and in his daily life he strove never to return evil actions or words with physical or verbal resistance. On the other hand, being bipolar, Tolstoy in some situations would drift in a manic direction, indulging in delusions of grandeur. Indeed, the aging Tolstoy occasionally went so far as to equate himself with God, as can be seen from his diaries and personal correspondence.The pantheistic world view which Tolstoy achieved at the end of his life meant that God was within himself and within all people and all things in the entire universe. By this time Tolstoy was also utilizing images of a mother to represent his God. With this essentially maternal God so conveniently available, there was nowhere Tolstoy could be without Her. For, in the end, Tolstoy's quest for God was a

Book Leo Tolstoy in Conversation with Four Peasant Sectarian Writers

Download or read book Leo Tolstoy in Conversation with Four Peasant Sectarian Writers written by Andrew Donskov and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme of the peasantry is central throughout most of Tolstoy’s long career. His obsession with this class is seen not just as a matter of social or humanitarian concern, but as a response to the questions of “how to live a good life” and “what is the meaning of life that an inevitable death will not destroy?” These questions plagued him his entire life. The letters he exchanged with the four major peasant sectarian writers (Bondarev, Zheltov, Verigin, and Novikov) reveal that Tolstoy was matched as a profound thinker by his correspondents, as they converse on religious-moral questions, the meaning of life and how one should strive to find it, and on a wide array of burning social and personal problems. Reading through the analysis and the extensively annotated letters as a unified whole, elucidates the progressive development of the ideas they shared (and where these diverged) and which guided Tolstoy’s and his correspondents’ lives. Juxtaposing Tolstoy’s letters with those of his four sectarian correspondents makes them even more significant as it shows them in their original context – a dialogue, or conversation. Also, with the aim to present the conversation in an even broader context, Andrew Donskov briefly discusses Tolstoy’s relationship with peasants in general as well as with each of the four individual writers in particular. In addition, he provides a background sketch of two major religious groups, namely the Doukhobors and the Molokans, both of which still claim sizeable populations of followers in North America today. Originally published in 2008 by the Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa under the title Leo Tolstoy and Russian peasant sectarian writers: Selected correspondence, the expanded University of Ottawa Press edition includes 44 letters never published in English, out of the total 155 letters. Correspondence translated by John Woodsworth. This book is published in English. - La paysannerie traverse la longue carrière de Tolstoï. Son obsession avec cette classe sociale doit être comprise non seulement comme une préoccupation sociale ou humanitaire, mais aussi comme une réponse aux questions « Comment mener une belle vie? » et « Quel est le sens de la vie que la mort inévitable ne saurait détruire? » qui l’ont hanté sa vie durant. La correspondance qu’ont échangée Tolstoï et quatre écrivains sectaires et liés à la paysannerie (Bondarev, Zheltov, Verigin et Novikov) révèle de grands penseurs. Au fil des échanges, les questions de religion et de moralité, du sens de la vie et comment faire pour le découvrir, et d’une gamme de questions sociales et personnelles du jour sont abordées. La lecture et l’analyse de cet ensemble d’échanges épistolaires enrichis de notes détaillées témoigne du développement progressif des idées qu’ils partageaient (ainsi que leurs divergences), et qui ont guidé la vie de chacun d’entre eux. La juxtaposition des lettres de Tolstoï et de ses quatre correspondants sectaires, qui sont présentées dans leur contexte original de dialogue – ou de conversation – permet d’en pleinement apprécier l’importance. Dans le but de situer cette conversation dans un contexte plus grand, Andrew Donskov aborde la question de la relation qu’entretient Tolstoï avec les paysans en général, d’une part, de même qu’avec chacun de ces quatre écrivains, d’autre part. Il offre par ailleurs un texte de présentation sur les Doukhobors et les Molokans, deux groupes confessionnaux qui comptent encore aujourd’hui un nombre appréciable d’adeptes en Amérique du Nord. Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Book The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy

Download or read book The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy written by Metta Spencer and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, Metta Spencer recounts the political and military changes that have occurred in Russia up to mid-2010. Using hundreds of interviews she conducted with officials, dissidents, and liberal intellectuals, she describes the various groups, forces, and individuals that worked to liberalize the totalitarian Soviet Union and its fellow nations behind the Iron Curtain, and which ultimately brought about the dissolution of those repressive governments. Spencer identifies four political orientations to describe Soviet society: 'Sheep,' ordinary citizens who accepted the undemocratic regime they lived in without challenging it; 'Dinosaurs,' hard-line Communist officials; 'Termites,' including Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers and government; and 'Barking Dogs,' a few hundred dissidents who made 'a lot of noise' protesting, hoping to awaken a grass-roots demand for democracy. The strange rivalry between the Termites and Barking Dogs would ultimately doom perestroika. Spencer's research dispels the widely-held perception that US President Ronald Reagan 'won' the Cold War by standing firm until the Soviet Union 'blinked first.' There are vitally important lessons to be learned from the Soviet period, about how to assist citizens of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes around the world. The irony is that transnational civil society organizations, major sources of the progress in Soviet Russia, are still needed today in authoritarian Russia, under Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, for totalitarianism remains a potential social trap. In The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, Metta Spencer suggests new ways of building urgently-needed social capital in today's Russia, where democracy has yet to flourish.

Book Times of Trouble

    Book Details:
  • Author : Marcus C. Levitt
  • Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
  • Release : 2007
  • ISBN : 9780299224301
  • Pages : 338 pages

Download or read book Times of Trouble written by Marcus C. Levitt and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the country that has added to our vocabulary such colorful terms as "purges," "pogroms," and "gulag," this collection investigates the conspicuous marks of violence in Russian history and culture. Russians and non-Russians alike have long debated the reasons for this endemic violence. Some have cited Russia's huge size, unforgiving climate, and exposed geographical position as formative in its national character, making invasion easy and order difficult. Others have fixed the blame on cultural and religious traditions that spurred internecine violence or on despotic rulers or unfortunate episodes in the nation's history, such as the Mongol invasion, the rule of Ivan the Terrible, or the "Red Terror" of the revolution. Even in contemporary Russia, the specter of violence continues, from widespread mistreatment of women to racial antagonism, the product of a frustrated nationalism that manifests itself in such phenomena as the wars in Chechnya. Times of Trouble is the first in English to explore the problem of violence in Russia. From a variety of perspectives, essays investigate Russian history as well as depictions of violence in the visual arts and in literature, including the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nina Sadur. From the Mongol invasion to the present day, topics include the gulag, genocide, violence against women, anti-Semitism, and terrorism as a tool of revolution.

Book Tolstoy and his Disciples

Download or read book Tolstoy and his Disciples written by Charlotte Alston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last thirty years of his life, Leo Tolstoy developed a moral philosophy that embraced pacifism, vegetarianism, the renunciation of private property, and a refusal to comply with the state. The transformation in his outlook led to his excommunication by the Orthodox Church, and the breakdown of his family life. Internationally, he inspired a legion of followers who formed communities and publishing houses devoted to living and promoting the Tolstoyan life. These enterprises flourished across Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and Tolstoyism influenced individuals as diverse as William Jennings Bryan and Mohandas Gandhi. In this book, Charlotte Alston provides the first in-depth historical account of this remarkable phenomenon, and provides an important re-assessment of Tolstoy's impact on the political life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The book is unique in its treatment of Tolstoyism as an international phenomenon: it explores both the connections between these Tolstoyan groups, and their relationships with other related reform movements.

Book A Quest for Community and Dynamic Non violence

Download or read book A Quest for Community and Dynamic Non violence written by Acharya K. K. Chandy and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiography of a clergyman and Christian leader from Kerala, India.

Book Leo Tolstoy

Download or read book Leo Tolstoy written by David R. Egan and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this quarter-century update of Leo Tolstoy: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Sources to 1978, authors David and Melinda Egan list the more than 1,200 books, essays, articles and doctoral dissertations written about the great Russian author from 1977 to 2003. The book provides a comprehensive list of English language studies of Tolstoy's life, art, thought and influence, by addressing his novels, the major components of his non-literary life, and his legacy to the world.

Book Introduction to Nonviolence

Download or read book Introduction to Nonviolence written by Ramin Jahanbegloo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Non-violent movements, under figures like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, led to some of the great social changes of the 20th century, and some argue it offers solutions for this century's problems. This book explores non-violence from its roots in diverse religious and philosophical traditions to its role in bringing social and political change today.

Book Tolstoy on the Couch

Download or read book Tolstoy on the Couch written by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere and published by Springer. This book was released on 1998-07-08 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata Lev Tolstoy declared war on human sexuality. Having fathered thirteen children by his wife and at least two children by peasant women, the great Russian writer now has the arrogance to suggest that people should stop having children. Psychoanalysis of Tolstoy's diaries and other private materials reveals that Tolstoy's anti-sex position was grounded in a sadistic attitude towards women (including his wife Sonia) and a punishing, masochistic attitude towards himself. These feelings, in turn, were related to the trauma of maternal loss in Tolstoy's early childhood.

Book Global Studies Directory

Download or read book Global Studies Directory written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publication of the Global Studies Directory represents an unprecedented project in world practice. Based on the professional assessment by a large international team of experts, the Directory offers information on the most well-known scholars, political and public figures who have made outstanding contributions to the establishment and development of global studies or made a fundamental impact on the formation of global world. The Directory also contains comprehensive information about organizations, periodicals and special literature of direct relevance to the theory and practice of globalization and fully demonstrates the state of affairs in the field of study on a global level. This project is a continuation of many years of research which first resulted in the publication of the Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary, the companion publication to the Directory.

Book John Ruskin and Nineteenth Century Education

Download or read book John Ruskin and Nineteenth Century Education written by Valerie Purton and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An art historian, cultural critic and political theorist, John Ruskin was, above all, a great educator. The inspiration behind William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi, Ruskin’s influence can be felt increasingly in every sphere education today. John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education brings together top international Ruskin scholars, exploring Ruskin’s many-faceted writings, pointing to some of the key educational issues raised by his work, and concluding with a powerful rereading of his ecological writing and apocalyptic vision of the earth’s future. In anticipation of the bicentennial of Ruskin’s birth in 2019, this volume makes a fresh and significant contribution to Victorian studies in the twenty-first century. It is dedicated to Dinah Birch, a much-loved Victorian specialist and authority on John Ruskin.

Book Contemporary Icons of Nonviolence

Download or read book Contemporary Icons of Nonviolence written by Anna Hamling and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 marked notable anniversaries for two of the most widely recognised icons of the philosophy of nonviolence, representing seventy years since the birth of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. Both brought significant, constructive, and far-reaching social and political change to the world. This volume offers an innovative perspective, placing them, their beliefs and theories within the chronology of the tradition of nonviolence, beginning with Lev Nikolaevicz Tolstoy and encompassing the likes of Óscar Romero, Nelson Mandela, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan. This collection of essays explores diverse understandings of the concepts of nonviolence in a philosophical and religious context. It also highlights the application of the techniques of nonviolence in the 21st century.

Book Utopia s Discontents

    Book Details:
  • Author : Faith Hillis
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2021
  • ISBN : 0190066334
  • Pages : 361 pages

Download or read book Utopia s Discontents written by Faith Hillis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia's Discontents provides the first synthetic treatment of the Russian revolutionary emigration before the Revolution. It argues that neighborhoods created by Russian exiles became sites of revolutionary experimentation that offered their residents a taste of their anticipated utopian future.

Book Natasha s Dance

    Book Details:
  • Author : Orlando Figes
  • Publisher : Macmillan
  • Release : 2002-10-21
  • ISBN : 0805057838
  • Pages : 781 pages

Download or read book Natasha s Dance written by Orlando Figes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-10-21 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the history of Russia, starting in the eighteenth century, through art, literature and customs of daily life.