Tolstoys False Disciple

Download or read book Tolstoy's False Disciple written by Alexandra Popoff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-11-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the snowy morning of February 8, 1897, the Petersburg secret police were following Tolstoy's every move, and he was always in the company of a man named Certkov. At sixty-nine, Russia's most celebrated writer was being treated like a major criminal, and had abandoned his literary pursuits and become a spiritual mystic, angering the Orthodox church and earning both the admination and ire of his countrymen. Tolstoy was recognizable enough, with his peasant garb and beard, but who was the man who towered over Tolstoy, twenty years younger, with a cold, impenetrable look on his face?This man, Chertkov, was a relative to the Tsars and nephew to the chief of the secret police and represented the very things Tolstoy had renounced—class privilege, unlimited power, and wealth—and yet Chertkov fascinated and attracted Tolstoy. He would become the writer's closest confidant, reading even his diary, and at the end of Tolstoy's life, Chertkov had him in his complete control, preventing him from even seeing his own wife on his deathbed.

Download or read book Tolstoy's Political Thought written by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), besides writing famous novels such as War and Peace, also wrote on political issues, especially later in his life, putting forward a political philosophy which might be termed 'Christian anarchism'. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Tolstoy’s political thought. It outlines in a systematic way Tolstoy’s thought, which was originally articulated unsystematically in diverse, often informal writing, such as pamphlets, letters, and speeches, as well as books, and in his novels, where Tolstoy’s thinking is put forward implicitly through the novels’ characters. The book sets out the basic themes of Tolstoy’s political thought: his acceptance of the teachings of Jesus, his criticism of the way in which Jesus’ teachings have been relayed by the church through traditional creeds and dogma, his passionate rejection of political violence by both the state and those working for reform, his plea for a nonviolent response to violence and injustice, and his call for society to forego its institutional shackles and enact a community of peace, love, and justice. The book also includes background information on the Russia of Tolstoy’s time, including the religious context, and a discussion of how Tolstoy’s political thought has been received by his admirers, who included Gandhi, and his critics.

Download or read book Sophia Tolstoy written by Alexandra Popoff and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Tolstoy experienced both glory and condemnation during their forty-eight-year marriage. She was admired as the muse and literary assistant to one of the world’s most celebrated novelists. But when in later years Tolstoy became a towering public figure and founded a new brand of religion, she was scorned for her disagreements with him. And it is this version of Sophia—malicious, shrill, perennially at war with Tolstoy—that has gone down in the historical record. Drawing on newly available archival material, including Sophia’s unpublished memoir, Alexandra Popoff presents a dramatically different and accurate portrait of the woman and the marriage. This lively, well-researched biography demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, Sophia was remarkably supportive of Tolstoy and was, in fact, key to his fame. Gifted and versatile, Sophia assisted Tolstoy during the writing of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Having modeled his most memorable female characters on her, Tolstoy admired his wife’s boundless energy, which he called “the force of life.” Sophia’s letters, never before translated, illuminate the couple’s true relationship and provide insights into Tolstoy’s creative laboratory. Although long portrayed as an elitist and hysterical countess, Sophia was in reality a practical, independent-minded, generous, and talented woman who shared Tolstoy’s important values and his capacity for work. Mother of thirteen, she participated in Tolstoy’s causes and managed all business a airs. Popoff describes in haunting detail the intrusion into their marriage by Tolstoy’s religious disciple Vladimir Chertkov, who controlled Tolstoy at the end of his life and led a smear campaign against Sophia, branding her evil and mad. She is still judged by Chertkov’s false accounts, which dismissed her valuable achievements and contributions. During his later religious phase, Tolstoy renounced his property and copyright, and Sophia had to become the breadwinner. She published Tolstoy’s collected works and supported their large family. Despite the pressures of her demanding life, she realized her own talents as a writer, photographer, translator, and aspiring artist. This vigorous, engrossing biography presents in fascinating depth and detail the many ways in which Sophia Tolstoy enriched the life and work of one of the world’s most revered authors.

Download or read book Breaking Free from Death written by Galina Rylkova and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking Free from Death examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, and not just the arguably universal fear of death but, equally important, the innumerable impositions on the part of various outsiders. Many conflicts in the lives of Rylkova’s subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supporting intellectuals, friends, and relatives. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and—by extrapolation—their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success.

Download or read book Tolstoy in Context written by Anna A. Berman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Likened to a second Tsar in Russia and attaining prophet-like status around the globe, Tolstoy made an impact on literature and the arts, religion, philosophy, and politics. His novels and stories both responded to and helped to reshape the European and Russian literary traditions. His non-fiction incensed readers and drew a massive following, making Tolstoy an important religious force as well as a stubborn polemicist in many fields. Through his involvement with Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, his aid in relocating the Doukhobors to Canada, his correspondence with American abolitionists and his polemics with scientists in the periodical press, Tolstoy engaged a vast array of national and international contexts of his time in his life and thought. This volume introduces those contexts and situates Tolstoy—the man and the writer—in the rich and tumultuous period in which his intellectual and creative output came to fruition.

Download or read book Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within written by Barbara Lounsberry and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II. During this period, the war began to bleed into Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf writes about Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; copies down the headlines of the day; and captures how war changed her daily life. Alongside Woolf’s own entries, Lounsberry explores the diaries of 18 other writers as Woolf read them, including the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. Lounsberry shows how reading diaries was both respite from Woolf’s public writing and also an inspiration for it. Tellingly, shortly before her suicide Woolf had stopped reading them completely. The outer war and Woolf’s inner life collide in this dramatic conclusion to the trilogy that resoundingly demonstrates why Virginia Woolf has been called “the Shakespeare of the diary.” Lounsberry’s masterful study is essential reading for a complete understanding of this extraordinary writer and thinker and the development of modernist literature.

Download or read book Leo Tolstoy written by Andrei Zorin and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, a young Leo Tolstoy set himself three immediate aims: to gamble, to marry, and to obtain a post. At that time he managed only the first. The writer’s momentous life would be full of forced breaks and abrupt departures, from the death of his beloved parents and tortuous courtship to a deep spiritual crisis and an abandonment of the social class into which he had been born. He also made several attempts to break up with literature, but each time he returned to writing. In this original and comprehensive biography, Andrei Zorin skillfully pieces together the life of one of the greatest novelists of all time. He offers both an innovative account of Tolstoy’s deepest feelings, emotions, and motives, as reflected in his personal diaries and letters, and a brilliant interpretation of his major works, including his celebrated novels on contemporary Russian society, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and his significant philosophical writings.