"Edward Wasiolek, after much valuable work on Dostoevsky, has now written one of the best books on Tolstoy in recent decades. This may be in part because of his preoccupation with Tolstoy's most challenging contemporary, and the resulting sense of their unlikeness in a common pursuit. But there are other, unspeculative reasons. Few studies of Tolstoy have been so carefully pondered and so firmly organized to convince; and not so many show the flexibility and variety of its approach. Wasiolek proposes an essentially simple and consistent reading, but he advances it with subtlety and discretion."—Henry Gifford, Times Literary Supplement

Edward Wasiolek is Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature and chairman of the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, coauthor of Nine Soviet Portraits, and editor of five notebooks—all published by the University of Chicago Press—that Dostoevsky kept for his major novels.