Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jeff Love

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826493798
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/25/2008
Series:	Guides for the Perplexed
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jeff Love is Associate Professor of German and Russian at Clemson University, USA. He is author of The Overcoming of History in 'War and Peace' (Rodopi, 2004).

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Hero Truth 1. 'Who am I?'2. A Novelist? 3. A Fabulist? 4. A Prophet? 5. A Philosopher? Epilogue: Tolstoy's LegacyFurther ReadingBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Jeff Love's Guide provides a highly abstracted, often daring, yet persuasive distillation of the major works of Tolstoy. Wonderfully organized by genre and written in clear, practical language... this compact book discerns profound and consistent patterns amidst a great variety of the author's writings... He derives numerous insights that one longs to apply to works by other authors... would serve as a useful introduction to Tolstoy's work... My own experience is that it also provides a stimulating, indeed challenging, afterword for those closely familiar with his works." - Slavic and East European Journal

Featured in article on new Beckett books in The Jewish Daily Forward.

"...the source of that puzzlement in the complexity and fecundity of Tolstoy's experience of life is intensely illuminated." Modern Language Review, 104.4, 2009

"A marvelously engaging, lucid road map to one of the world's most fertile and infuriating creative minds. In a series of deep readings in deft philosophical frames, Jeff Love returns to Tolstoy his magnificent strangeness while at the same time increasing the comfort zone of home." - Caryl Emerson, Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USAÂ

'It is pleasing to see new academic possibilities being opened up in a work marketed primarily at students and the general reader.'

From the Publisher