Leo tolstoy - wikipedia
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Leo Tolstoy
(1828-1910)
Who Was Leo Tolstoy?
In the 1860s, Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote his first great novel, War and Peace. In 1873, Tolstoy set to work on the second of his best-known novels, Anna Karenina. He continued to write fiction throughout the 1880s and 1890s. One of his most successful later works was The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Early Life
On September 9, 1828, writer Leo Tolstoy was born at his family's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula Province of Russia. He was the youngest of four boys. When Tolstoy's mother died in 1830, his father's cousin took over caring for the children. When their father, Count Nikolay Tolstoy, died just seven years later, their aunt was appointed their legal guardian. When the aunt passed away, Tolstoy and his siblings moved in with a second aunt, in Kazan, Russia. Although Tolstoy experienced a lot of loss at an early age, he would later idealize his childhood memories in his writing.
Tolstoy received his primary education at home, at the hands of French and German tutors. In 1843, he enrolled in an Oriental languages p
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Leo Tolstoy
[Tolstoy's] urge to shed distractions and commitments is one of the continuities that Andrei Zorin, a cultural historian at Oxford, traces in his beautiful account of Tolstoy's long, astonishing life . . . In an ingenious, seamless approach that distinguishes his biography from others, Mr Zorin treats the events of Tolstoy's life and his writing as a single, indivisible whole.
'The Economist 'Books of the Year'
Andrei 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, TLS 'Books of the Year'
The figure that emerges from these pages is a complex one. For left-wing progressives, Tolstoy was a reactionary; while conservatives saw him as a self-destructive nihilist . . . A pious religious fanatic with a messianic complex might be somewhat closer to the truth. But even Christ hims
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Tolstoy (Ebook)
A Russian Life
Rosamund Bartlett
Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina are considered two of the greatest novels ever written. Here is a fresh perspective on his extraordinary life and times
In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station attended by the world's media. He was eighty-two years old and had lived a remarkable and long life during one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history.
Born into a privileged aristocratic family, he seemed set to join the ranks of degenerate Russian noblemen, but fighting in the Crimean war alongside rank and file soldiers opened his eyes to Russia's social problems and he threw himself into teaching the peasantry to read and write. After his marriage he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both regarded as two of the greatest novels in world literature.
Rosamund Bartlett's exceptional biography of this brilliant, maddening and contrary man draws on key Russian sources, including the many fascinating new materials which have been published about Tolst
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