Book review: 'Tolstoy: A Russian Life'
Tolstoy: A Russian Life
Rosamund Bartlett
Count Lev Tolstoy is one of those writers who was as fascinating and complex as his novels and stories. A man so awful and quarrelsome to those around him, especially his long-suffering wife, was nonetheless able to produce masterpieces of serene introspection and humane insights. How could Tolstoy, a loner, a quintessential outsider all his life, understand and evoke the glittering social whirl and intricacies of fashionable salons? How could someone so masculine through and through somehow plumb sympathetically in his fiction the female psyche, which seemed, in real life, to perplex him at times beyond endurance? In short, he is a dream subject for a literary biographer.
But with such richness comes the inevitable difficulty of writing about a man whose life was so messy and destructive, so tormented and tormenting to those around him, and reconciling all this mayhem with the lapidary literary products of his head and heart. The good news is that in "Tolstoy: A Russian Life" British Russophile Rosamund Bartlett, author of a fine biography of Anton Chekhov, has managed to reconcile the contrarieties and produce a marvelously judicious, insightful study.
Fundamentally sympathetic to Tolstoy, she is also adept at identifying events in his youth, like the early deaths first of his mother, then his father, that destabilized his personality: The result is a clear-eyed biography that never minimizes its subject's faults while not losing sight of his better nature. Nor, all-important, of his artistic genius, with its protean imagination and prodigious talent for putting into deathless prose everything from historical and philosophical speculation to the simplest, most essential features of human characters and existence.
Bartlett's biography of Tolstoy is not one of those overburdened with literary criticism, which might dismay those who like a lot in biographies of writers, but she is so attuned to his creative process that little is lacking in her portrait of how he was able to compose all that amazing prose. She has a new translation soon to appear of what may well be the acme of his fiction, "Anna Karenina," and it is significant that her excellent chapter on the intricacies of his struggles to perfect the huge task of writing it is simply titled "Novelist."
Nowhere is the intimacy of her understanding of her subject more apparent than in her painstaking reconstruction of how Tolstoy was able to produce this prose miracle. A result that, she reports, left even its author "fairly nonplussed" to learn that "most recent reviews were hailing him to be a writer as great as Shakespeare, and that even Dostoyevsky was waving his arms about and calling Tolstoy a 'god of art.'".. If there is one central insight running through Bartlett's life of Tolstoy it is his essential Russianness...
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-rosamund-bartlett-20111225,0,985399.story
Rosamund Bartlett
Count Lev Tolstoy is one of those writers who was as fascinating and complex as his novels and stories. A man so awful and quarrelsome to those around him, especially his long-suffering wife, was nonetheless able to produce masterpieces of serene introspection and humane insights. How could Tolstoy, a loner, a quintessential outsider all his life, understand and evoke the glittering social whirl and intricacies of fashionable salons? How could someone so masculine through and through somehow plumb sympathetically in his fiction the female psyche, which seemed, in real life, to perplex him at times beyond endurance? In short, he is a dream subject for a literary biographer.
But with such richness comes the inevitable difficulty of writing about a man whose life was so messy and destructive, so tormented and tormenting to those around him, and reconciling all this mayhem with the lapidary literary products of his head and heart. The good news is that in "Tolstoy: A Russian Life" British Russophile Rosamund Bartlett, author of a fine biography of Anton Chekhov, has managed to reconcile the contrarieties and produce a marvelously judicious, insightful study.
Fundamentally sympathetic to Tolstoy, she is also adept at identifying events in his youth, like the early deaths first of his mother, then his father, that destabilized his personality: The result is a clear-eyed biography that never minimizes its subject's faults while not losing sight of his better nature. Nor, all-important, of his artistic genius, with its protean imagination and prodigious talent for putting into deathless prose everything from historical and philosophical speculation to the simplest, most essential features of human characters and existence.
Bartlett's biography of Tolstoy is not one of those overburdened with literary criticism, which might dismay those who like a lot in biographies of writers, but she is so attuned to his creative process that little is lacking in her portrait of how he was able to compose all that amazing prose. She has a new translation soon to appear of what may well be the acme of his fiction, "Anna Karenina," and it is significant that her excellent chapter on the intricacies of his struggles to perfect the huge task of writing it is simply titled "Novelist."
Nowhere is the intimacy of her understanding of her subject more apparent than in her painstaking reconstruction of how Tolstoy was able to produce this prose miracle. A result that, she reports, left even its author "fairly nonplussed" to learn that "most recent reviews were hailing him to be a writer as great as Shakespeare, and that even Dostoyevsky was waving his arms about and calling Tolstoy a 'god of art.'".. If there is one central insight running through Bartlett's life of Tolstoy it is his essential Russianness...
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-rosamund-bartlett-20111225,0,985399.story
