Tolstoy A Biography |
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AN Wilson
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Pages: 624 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0393321223
Pub: W.W. Norton & Co
Pub date: 2001-05-03
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 199385
Reader Reviews:
Read it! (4/6 people found this helpful)
Simply put, I enjoyed this biography immensely. As a reader, and re-reader, of Tolstoy since adolescence, this biography served to renew and sharpen my interest in Tolstoy's novels, and moreover to bring the man to life in my mind, and he was a very big character -- thus an apt subject for biography. I am surprised that this admirable, highly-entertaining work by the clever AN Wilson (his Iris Murdoch book is v. good too, a hoot in fact) is not better known and more widely-read than it is. To my mind, it is a gem. It shines with Wilson's own enthusiam, and renews ones own enthusiasm for this brilliant Russian writer.
Tolstoy without the heart (8/11 people found this helpful)
Great biographers let their subjects speak, and bring them to life again. Wilson however, allows his own decision to turn away from Christianity to colour his approach to Tolstoy. He dismisses the heart of the great writer's philsophy of life, which also came close to the anarchism of fellow Russian aristocrat Kropotkin as "silly", and ignored what for Tolstoy was the essence of his existence, his faith that where love is, there God is. Faith not in Church, or ritual, priests or popes, but that the kingdom of God is in all of us, and in the core of Christian belief and practice - Jesus and the sermon on the mount. And so instead of a biography of a great man and humble Christian who influenced Gandhi, who turned from wealth to life with the peasants, who extolled simplicty and living in harmony nature, who has inspired generations of anti-war actvists amd pacifists, we have a biography which skims the surface of Tolstoy. We have another book about Wilson, by Wilson. I recommend Derrick Leon or Aylmer Maude - they may be older and more sympathetic biographers, but they get to the heart of the man.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Biography -> Novelists, Poets & Playwrights -> Novelists -> Authors, P-Z -> Tolstoy, Leo
Books -> Subjects -> Poetry, Drama & Criticism -> History & Criticism -> Novels & Novelists -> 19th Century
uk-shops -> Education Resources -> Books -> English Literature Study Guides -> Novels & Novelists -> 19th Century