Simply Tolstoy

✍ Scribed by Donna Tussing Orwin

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 93 KB
• Edition: First edition
• Category: Fiction
• City: New York
• ISBN: 1943657165
• ASIN: B072C8NJLX

✦ Synopsis

“This is a little gem, the best introduction to Tolstoy I have ever encountered, and it is more than that. The most accomplished scholar will find important new insights, the sort that one immediately recognizes as both true and profound. Orwin brings Tolstoy to life as a person and as a writer, and she also shows beautifully how the two are linked. The discussions of Tolstoy's views on psychology and the nature of art are especially illuminating.”—Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern UniversityCountLeo Tolstoy(1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his ancestral estate located about 120 miles from Moscow. While he would live and travel in other places over the years, he always considered this family residence in the Russian heartland as his home. His lifelong quest for truth and meaning began while he was a university student. Subsequent experiences as an artillery officer in the Caucasian and Crimean Wars, and time spent in St. Petersburg and Europe, broadened his perspective and profoundly influenced him.InSimply Tolstoy, ProfessorDonna Tussing Orwintraces the author’s profound journey of discovery and explains how he mined his tumultuous inner life to create his great works, includingWar and Peace,Anna KareninaandThe Death of Ivan Ilych. She shows how these books, both fiction and nonfiction, are not autobiographical in the conventional sense, but function as snapshots of Tolstoy’s state of mind at specific points in his life. The story she tells is, inevitably, intertwined with the story of Russia, a country also in constant search of its identity.Mixing biography, literary analysis, and history,Simply Tolstoyis a satisfying read for those already familiar with the author’s work, as well as an accessible and thoroughly engaging introduction to a literary giant who was also a tireless and uncompromising seeker of truth.