Tolstoy

by Henry Gifford

Book Overview

This volume focuses on Tolstoy's significance as a thinker in his own time, as well as in the present. Henry Gifford sets him and his views in the context of nineteenth-century Russia and Europe. He also offers a compelling account of Tolstoy's difficulties in establishing his vocation as a teacher in his own village school, his educational theory, his religious thought, his practical recommendations for living, and his controversial views on art...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192875442
• ISBN13: 9780192875440
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.4" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A small introduction to the life and work of Tolstoy

This volume in the 'Past Masters' series surveys the life and thought of Tolstoy. Tolstoy is of course a great and complicated figure whose two masterpieces ' War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina ' stand at the summit of world - fiction. Gifford tells the story of the landowner, patriarch Tolstoy whose vision of a better world was somehow rooted in the social thought of the eighteenth century. He tells of how Tolstoy made at the center of his vision of community, the ideal of the family. He reads 'War and Peace' in his brief chapter on the subject as a work in which personal connections and relations are always made in terms of family connections. He underlines the uniqueness of Tolstoy's social vision, and his great loneliness in pursuing it. He does not however really begin to explain the miracle of Tolstoy's powerful presentation of reality, his incomparable capacity to make the physical and social worlds come to life. This book provides much information to add to our understanding of Tolstoy , but not in regard to what is most important in him, the miracle of his creative art.