Download or read book Tolstoy s Art and Thought 1847 1880 written by Donna Tussing Orwin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-16 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy written by Donna Tussing Orwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century after Leo Tolstoy's death, the author of War and Peace is widely admired but too often thought of only with reference to his realism and moral sense. The many sides of Tolstoy revealed in these essays speak to readers with astonishing force, relevance, and complexity. In a lively, challenging style, leading scholars range over his long life, from his first work Childhood to the works of his old age like Hadji Murat, and the many genres in which he worked, from the major novels to aphorisms and short stories. The essays present fresh approaches to his central themes: love, death, religious faith and doubt, violence, the animal kingdom, and war. They also assess his reception both in his lifetime and subsequently. Setting new agendas for the study of this classic author, this volume provides a snapshot of more current scholarship on Tolstoy.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy written by Donna Tussing Orwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-19 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for his great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy remains one the most important nineteenth-century writers; throughout his career which spanned nearly three quarters of a century, he wrote fiction, journalistic essays and educational textbooks. The specially commissioned essays in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy do justice to the sheer volume of Tolstoy s writing. Key dimensions of his writing and life are explored in essays focusing on his relationship to popular writing, the issue of gender and sexuality in his fiction and his aesthetics. The introduction provides a brief, unified account of the man, for whom his art was only one activity among many. The volume is well supported by supplementary material including a detailed guide to further reading and a chronology of Tolstoy s life, the most comprehensive compiled in English to date. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
Download or read book Leo Tolstoy written by John Bayley and published by Northcote House Pub Limited. This book was released on 1997 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Tolstoy's writing remains as lively, as fascinating, and as absorbing as ever and continues to have a profound influence on imaginative writing. This original and elegant study serves as an introduction to Tolstoy, concentrating on his 2 best novels.
Download or read book A History of the Bildungsroman written by Sarah Graham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bildungsroman has been one of the most significant genres in Western literature since the eighteenth century. This volume, comprised of eleven chapters by leading experts in the field, offers original insights into how the novel of formation developed a strong tradition in Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and the USA. In demonstrating how the genre has been adopted and adapted in innovative forms of fiction, this volume also shows how a genre traditionally associated with the young white man has been used to give expression to the formative experiences of women, LGBTQ people, and post-colonial populations. Exploring the genre's emergence and evolution in numerous countries and across more than two hundred years, this volume provides unprecedented historical and geographical coverage and demonstrates that the Bildungsroman has a rich heritage and a bright future.
Download or read book Tolstoi and the Evolution of His Artistic World written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joe Andrew and Robert Reid assemble thirteen analytical discussions of Tolstoi’s key works, written by leading scholars from around the world. The works studied cover almost the entire length of Tolstoi’s career; the analyses present unique insights into Tolstoi’s artistic world.
Download or read book Natasha s Dance written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History on a grand scale--an enchanting masterpiece that explores the making of one of the world's most vibrant civilizations A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, internationally renowned historian Orlando Figes does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together. Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg--a "window on the West"--and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself--its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works--by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall--with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. Figes's characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife. Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the spirit of "Russianness" is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory--a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state.
Download or read book Tolstoy s Quest for God written by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 210 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 compensatory search for the mother who died when he was barely two years old. Tolstoy's Quest for God is an original and penetrating contribution to the study of one of the world's supreme writers.
Download or read book Tolstoy A Guide for the Perplexed written by Jeff Love and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the most important writers in the Western tradition. His two great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, cover an enormous range of basic human experiences with a precision and probing spirit that, in the words of one critic, are simply "unmatched by any other writer." This guide offers students a clear introduction to Tolstoy's literary works from his major novels to the shorter novels and texts, including Hadji Murat and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The guide also covers major themes including sex, death, authority and evil and offers an overview of Tolstoy's religious and philosophical thought. A final chapter assesses his lasting influence in the spheres of literature and culture, religion and philosophy and on major figures including Joyce, Ghandi, Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
Download or read book Anna Karenina written by Leo Tolstoy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 898 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina is the story of a beautiful woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties. This major translation conveys Tolstoy's precision of meaning and emotional accuracy in an English version that is highly readable and stylistically faithful.
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.
Download or read book The Art of Being written by Yi-Ping Ong and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of Being is a powerful account of how the literary form of the novel reorients philosophy toward the meaning of existence. Yi-Ping Ong shows that for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir, the form of the novel in its classic phase yields the conditions for reconceptualizing the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. Their discovery gives rise to a radically new poetics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel. For the existentialists, a paradox lies at the heart of the novel. As a work of art, the novel exists as a given totality. At the same time, the capacity of the novel to compel belief in the free and independent existence of its characters depends on the absence of any perspective from which their lives may be viewed as a consummated whole. At stake in the poetics of the novel are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible. Ong’s reframing of foundational debates in novel theory takes us beyond old dichotomies of mind and world, interiority and totality, and form and mimesis. It illuminates existential dimensions of novelistic realism overlooked by empirical and sociological approaches. Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, The Art of Being reveals how the novel engages in its very form with philosophically rich notions of self-knowledge, freedom, authority, world, and the unfinished character of human life.
Download or read book Who What Am I written by Irina Paperno and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "God only knows how many diverse, captivating impressions and thoughts evoked by these impressions... pass in a single day. If it were only possible to render them in such a way that I could easily read myself and that others could read me as I do..." Such was the desire of the young Tolstoy. Although he knew that this narrative utopia—turning the totality of his life into a book—would remain unfulfilled, Tolstoy would spend the rest of his life attempting to achieve it. "Who, What Am I?" is an account of Tolstoy's lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits and, ultimately, to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience.This book guides readers through the voluminous, highly personal nonfiction writings that Tolstoy produced from the 1850s until his death in 1910. The variety of these texts is enormous, including diaries, religious tracts, personal confessions, letters, autobiographical fragments, and the meticulous accounts of dreams. For Tolstoy, inherent in the structure of the narrative form was a conception of life that accorded linear temporal order a predominant role, and this implied finitude. He refused to accept that human life stopped with death and that the self was limited to what could be remembered and told. In short, his was a philosophical and religious quest, and he followed in the footsteps of many, from Plato and Augustine to Rousseau and Schopenhauer. In reconstructing Tolstoy's struggles, this book reflects on the problems of self and narrative as well as provides an intellectual and psychological biography of the writer.
Download or read book Leo Tolstoy written by Andrei Zorin and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, a young Leo Tolstoy set himself three immediate aims: to gamble, to marry, and to obtain a post. At that time he managed only the first. The writer’s momentous life would be full of forced breaks and abrupt departures, from the death of his beloved parents and tortuous courtship to a deep spiritual crisis and an abandonment of the social class into which he had been born. He also made several attempts to break up with literature, but each time he returned to writing. In this original and comprehensive biography, Andrei Zorin skillfully pieces together the life of one of the greatest novelists of all time. He offers both an innovative account of Tolstoy’s deepest feelings, emotions, and motives, as reflected in his personal diaries and letters, and a brilliant interpretation of his major works, including his celebrated novels on contemporary Russian society, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and his significant philosophical writings.
Download or read book The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories written by Leo Tolstoy and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1985-09-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the self-lacerating confession of a man consumed by sexual jealousy and eaten up by shame and eventually driven to murder his wife. The story caused a sensation when it first appeared and Tolstoy's wife was appalled that he had drawn on their own experiences together to create a scathing indictment of marriage. 'The Devil', centring on a young man torn between his passion for a peasant girl and his respectable life with his loving wife, also illustrates the impossibility of pure love. 'The Forged Coupon' shows how an act of corruption can spiral out of control, and 'After the Ball' examines the abuse of power. Written during a time of spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, these late stories reflect a world of moral uncertainties.
Download or read book The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories written by Leo Tolstoy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-05-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are some of Tolstoy?s extraordinary short stories, from ?The Death of Ivan Ilyich??in a masterly new translation?to ?The Raid,? ?The Wood-felling,? ?Three Deaths,? ?Polikushka,? ?After the Ball,? and ?The Forged Coupon,? all gripping and eloquent lessons on two of Tolstoy?s most persistent themes: life and death. More experimental than his novels, Tolstoy?s stories are essential reading for anyone interested in his development as one of the major writers and thinkers of his time.
Download or read book Transnational Tolstoy written by John Burt Foster, Jr. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-06-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 Transnational Tolstoy renews and enhances our understanding of Tolstoy's fiction in the context of "World Literature," a term that he himself used in What is Art? (1897). It offers a fresh perspective on Tolstoy's fiction as it connects with writers and works from outside his Russian context, including Stendhal, Flaubert, Goethe, Proust, Lampedusa and Mahfouz. Foster provides an interlocking series of cross-cultural readings ranging from nineteenth-century Germany, France, and Italy through the rise of modernist fiction and the crisis of World War II, to the growth of a worldwide literary outlook from 1960 onward. He emphasizes Tolstoy's writings with the most consistent international resonance: War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two of the world's most compelling novels. Transnational Tolstoy also discusses a shorter work, Hadji Murad. It shares the earlier novels' historical sweep, social breadth, and subtle interplay among a large cast of characters. Along with bringing Tolstoy's gifts to bear on a Muslim protagonist, it also represents his most sustained attempt at world literature.
