BiblioVault - Books about Tolstoy, Leo

Disarming Manhood

Roots of Ethical Resistance

David A.J. Richards

Ohio University Press, 2005

Masculine codes of honor and dominance often are expressed in acts of violence, including war and terrorism. In Disarming Manhood: Roots of Ethical Resistance, David A.J. Richards examines the lives of five famous men—great leaders and crusaders—who actively resisted violence and presented their causes with more humane alternatives.Richards argues that Winston Churchill, William Lloyd Garrison, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Leo Tolstoy shared a psychology whose nonviolent roots were deeply influenced by a loving, maternalistic ethos deeply influenced by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Drawing upon psychology, history, political theory, and literature, Richards threads a connection between these leaders and the maternal figures who profoundly shaped their responses to conflict. Their lives and work underscore how the outlook of maternal care givers and women enables some men to resist the violent responses characteristic of traditional manhood. The voice of nonviolent masculinity has empowered important democratic movements of ethical transformation, including civil disobedience in South Africa, India, and the United States. Disarming Manhood demonstrates that as Churchill, Garrison, Gandhi, King, and Tolstoy carried out their various missions they were galvanized by teachings whose ethical foundations rejected unjust violence and favored peaceful alternatives. Accessibly written and free of jargon, Disarming Manhood's exploration of human nature and maternal bonds will interest a wide audience as it furthers the understanding of human nature itself and contributes to the fields of developmental psychology and feminist scholarship.

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FRAMING ANNA KARENINA

TOLSTOY, WOMEN QUESTION, & VICTORIAN NOV

AMY MANDELKER

The Ohio State University Press, 2004

How the Russians Read the French

Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy

Priscilla Meyer

University of Wisconsin Press

Russian writers of the nineteenth century were quite consciously creating a new national literary tradition. They saw themselves self-consciously through Western European eyes, at once admiring Europe and feeling inferior to it. This ambivalence was perhaps most keenly felt in relation to France, whose language and culture had shaped the world of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Catherine the Great.

In How the Russians Read the French, Priscilla Meyer shows how Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy engaged with French literature and culture to define their own positions as Russian writers with specifically Russian aesthetic and moral values. Rejecting French sensationalism and what they perceived as a lack of spirituality among Westerners, these three writers attempted to create moral and philosophical works of art that drew on sources deemed more acceptable to a Russian worldview, particularly Pushkin and the Gospels. Through close readings of A Hero of Our Time, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, Meyer argues that each of these great Russian authors takes the French tradition as a thesis, proposes his own antithesis, and creates in his novel a synthesis meant to foster a genuinely Russian national tradition, free from imitation of Western models.

Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies

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On Life

A Critical Edition

Leo Tolstoy, Edited by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Translated from the Russian by Michael Denner and Inessa Medzhibovskaya

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In the summer of 1886, shortly before his fifty-eighth birthday, Leo Tolstoy was seriously injured while working in the fields of his estate. Bedridden for over two months, Tolstoy began writing a meditation on death and dying that soon developed into a philosophical treatise on life, death, love, and the overcoming of pessimism. Although begun as an account of how one man encounters and laments his death and makes this death his own, the final work, On Life, describes the optimal life in which we can all be happy despite our mortality.

After its completion, On Life was suppressed by the tsars, attacked by the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, and then censored by the Stalinist regime. This critical edition is the first accurate translation of this unsung classic of Russian thought into English, based on a study of manuscript pages of Tolstoy's drafts, and the first scholarly edition of this work in any language. It includes a detailed introduction and annotations, as well as historical material, such as early drafts, documents related to the presentation of an early version at the Moscow Psychological Society, and responses to the work by philosophers, religious leaders, journalists, and ordinary readers of Tolstoy's day.

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Tolstoy

Plays: Volume III: 1894-1910

Leo Tolstoy

Northwestern University Press, 1998

Although Tolstoy's fame rests on his novels, he was also a prolific dramatist. Because his plays are satirical, didactic, and colored by complex peasant dialect, earlier translations have been seriously flawed. These imperfect translations, coupled with Tolstoy's famous polemics against Shakespeare and Chekhov, have reinforced the general misapprehension that Tolstoy was not a dramatist.

Now noted Slavic philologist Marvin Kantor and Tatiana Tulchinsky have prepared the first complete English translation of the great writer's plays. This volume contains plays written during the years 1894 to 1910, including:

Peter the Breadman
And the Light Shineth in Darkness
The Living Corpse
The Wisdom of Children
The Traveler and the Peasant
The Cause of It All

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Tolstoy's Phoenix

From Method to Meaning in War and Peace

George R. Clay

Northwestern University Press, 1998

By examining Tolstoy's techniques and analyzing the structure of War and Peace, essayist George R. Clay offers a fresh perspective and jargon-free analysis of one of the world's greatest novels. Beginning with Tolstoy's strategies, devices, and structural elements, Clay moves beyond previous approaches and reveals the novel's larger thematic concerns, showing how all the pieces fit into an overall pattern that he calls the phoenix design.

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