Leo Tolstoy (Twayne's World Authors Series)
Twayne Publishers | March 1986 | 143 pages | English | ISBN : 0805766235,0805766233 | PDF | 1.1MB
To do justice within the sensible confines of a Twayne book to a person whose complete collected works number ninety volumes is no easy task. It was impossible to cover all of Tolstoy's writings in depth, as it was to acknowledge fully all the valuable critical commentaries devoted to these writings. My primary aim has been to present a picture of Tolstoy the man, thinker, and writer, as well as to offer careful readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and some of his more important shorter works.
Writing about reading Tolstoy, Yury Olesha has suggested that just as there are scientific miracles, so there are "miracles of literature." As an example, he cites Tolstoy's description of the night sky in one of his Caucasian stories. It would be worthwhile, Olesha declares, to collect a hundred such miracles in order to demonstrate how some people can think and see: "even those who cannot so think and see would respect themselves at that moment, understanding that inasmuch as they are also people, they are capable of much."1 I have tried, in the pages that follow, to collect some Tolstoyan miracles, to make them available to the English reader, and to relate their individual spendor to the overall pattern of his art.
