Tolstoy's Letters: Volume I 1828-1879; Volume II 1880-1910
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
A window into the mind of one of literature's greatest giants, Tolstoy's Letters presents a meticulously curated, two-volume collection of correspondence spanning over eight decades of Leo Tolstoy's extraordinary life, from his early years in 1828 through to his death in 1910. Selected, edited, and translated by renowned Tolstoy scholar R. F. Christian, this indispensable collection chronicles the Russian master's most intimate thoughts, moral struggles, creative processes, and relationships with fellow writers, family members, and political contemporaries. The letters illuminate the man behind War and Peace and Anna Karenina — passionate, contradictory, relentlessly searching for spiritual truth — offering an unfiltered portrait that no biography alone could provide. Christian's scholarly apparatus enriches every page, situating each letter within its historical and biographical context, making this collection as rigorously academic as it is deeply personal. The correspondence reveals the arc of Tolstoy's transformation from a celebrated aristocratic novelist into a radical moral philosopher whose influence reshaped the cultural landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For students of Russian literature, historians of ideas, and admirers of great prose, these volumes pose a tantalising question: which version of Tolstoy — the artist, the ascetic, or the revolutionary — was the most real?
Author: R. F. Christian
Format: Hardback
Published: 1978, University of London -The Athlone Press
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
A window into the mind of one of literature's greatest giants, Tolstoy's Letters presents a meticulously curated, two-volume collection of correspondence spanning over eight decades of Leo Tolstoy's extraordinary life, from his early years in 1828 through to his death in 1910. Selected, edited, and translated by renowned Tolstoy scholar R. F. Christian, this indispensable collection chronicles the Russian master's most intimate thoughts, moral struggles, creative processes, and relationships with fellow writers, family members, and political contemporaries. The letters illuminate the man behind War and Peace and Anna Karenina — passionate, contradictory, relentlessly searching for spiritual truth — offering an unfiltered portrait that no biography alone could provide. Christian's scholarly apparatus enriches every page, situating each letter within its historical and biographical context, making this collection as rigorously academic as it is deeply personal. The correspondence reveals the arc of Tolstoy's transformation from a celebrated aristocratic novelist into a radical moral philosopher whose influence reshaped the cultural landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For students of Russian literature, historians of ideas, and admirers of great prose, these volumes pose a tantalising question: which version of Tolstoy — the artist, the ascetic, or the revolutionary — was the most real?