Leo Tolstoy

(Paperback)

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Description

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 to an abandonment of the social class into which he had been born. Andrei Zorin skilfully pieces together Tolstoy's life, offering an account of the novelist's deepest feelings and motives, and a brilliant interpretation of his major works, including the celebrated novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

'I know of no other biography of Tolstoy as succinct, as objective, as readable or as thought-provoking as Andrei Zorin's.' Donald Rayfield, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian, Queen Mary, University of London

'Zorin has produced a masterpiece where erudition and intellectual elegance intersect.' Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Gurard Professor in Literature, Emeritus, Stanford University

Reviews

"Zorin's Leo Tolstoy illuminates Tolstoy's personal prejudices and passions as the core of his fiction. Zorin's biography has confirmed my amateurish guess that Tolstoy's main obsession was his fear of the uncontrollable forces of sex, music, and violence ruling his life."--Zinovy Zinik "Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year"

Author Bio

Andrei Zorin is Professor and Chair of Russian at the University of Oxford, UK. He is the author and co-author of many books on Russian literature and culture including On The Periphery of Europe 1762-1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (2018).