Tolstoy: An Approach
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: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few literary giants loom as large or as contradictory as Leo Tolstoy — a man who wrote two of the greatest novels ever conceived while simultaneously waging war against the very civilization that celebrated him. Janko Lavrin's Tolstoy: An Approach presents a penetrating critical study of this titan of Russian literature, charting the turbulent inner landscape of a man torn between artistic genius and moral fanaticism, between the worldly splendour of War and Peace and Anna Karenina and the ascetic, spiritually tormented reformer he became in his final decades. Lavrin, himself a distinguished Slavic scholar, brings a rare combination of biographical intimacy and critical rigour to his subject, illuminating the psychological and philosophical forces that shaped Tolstoy's art and his infamous later renunciation of it. Written with elegant economy and intellectual authority, this second edition refines Lavrin's argument that Tolstoy's greatness cannot be understood without confronting the profound tensions that defined his life — tensions between flesh and spirit, art and conscience, freedom and dogma. For anyone who has ever been moved by Tolstoy's fiction, this work poses an unsettling question: what does it mean when the greatest storyteller of his age declares that stories are not enough?
Author: Janko Lavrin
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few literary giants loom as large or as contradictory as Leo Tolstoy — a man who wrote two of the greatest novels ever conceived while simultaneously waging war against the very civilization that celebrated him. Janko Lavrin's Tolstoy: An Approach presents a penetrating critical study of this titan of Russian literature, charting the turbulent inner landscape of a man torn between artistic genius and moral fanaticism, between the worldly splendour of War and Peace and Anna Karenina and the ascetic, spiritually tormented reformer he became in his final decades. Lavrin, himself a distinguished Slavic scholar, brings a rare combination of biographical intimacy and critical rigour to his subject, illuminating the psychological and philosophical forces that shaped Tolstoy's art and his infamous later renunciation of it. Written with elegant economy and intellectual authority, this second edition refines Lavrin's argument that Tolstoy's greatness cannot be understood without confronting the profound tensions that defined his life — tensions between flesh and spirit, art and conscience, freedom and dogma. For anyone who has ever been moved by Tolstoy's fiction, this work poses an unsettling question: what does it mean when the greatest storyteller of his age declares that stories are not enough?