Breaking free of the tendency to focus on a very limited range of Russia's "literary giants" and to assume their uniqueness, Grigoryan instead places the subjects of her study in their historical and literary context, offering balanced explanations that "historicize various aspects of Tolstoy's work," for example, and explain them "as not just '
Tolstoyan' (read: protean, strange), but also as all but determined by Russian imperial culture and political history" (8).
The brilliant scholar Simon Karlinsky has written about the "lesser tradition in Russian literature," which he associated with the precise and restrained art of Chekhov and Nabokov as opposed to the grand visions and claims of the
Tolstoyan or Dostoevskian kind.
Gessen tells the larger story through the prism of a few individuals, and this gives the book a
Tolstoyan, novelistic feel that sustains its momentum through nearly five hundred pages.
The man is a committed "
Tolstoyan" who is committed to revolution and nonviolent social transformation.
I see little real disagreement on the centrality of economic justice to Welsh nationalism - and that's true whether people style themselves decentralist socialists (as I do), or radical liberals (in the Nonconformist sense) or
Tolstoyan pacifists, as Gwynfor was so effectively.
I see little real disagreement on the centrality of economic justice to Welsh nationalism -- and that's true whether people style themselves decentralist socialists (as I do), or radical liberals (in the Nonconformist sense) or
Tolstoyan pacifists, as Gwynfor was so effectively.
"[T]his is by far Gessen's best book, a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a
Tolstoyan gallery of characters....
The Components of War and Peace might be read on one level as a droll riposte to Henry James's critiques of
Tolstoyan formlessness.
The guy could make the phone book (ask your parents what that was) sound like a
Tolstoyan epic.
Occasionally the writing is
Tolstoyan too, in its focus on the interaction of characters with the river of time "which flowed through them and over them", and in its sense of individual lives connecting with wider society.
When Suite Francaise came to light in 2004, critics quickly hailed the detailed, unforgiving, almost
Tolstoyan portrait of the French under occupation.
(The book opens, in somewhat daunting
Tolstoyan fashion, with a twelve-page "list of characters.") Zygar briefly retells the familiar story of Putin's ascent to the presidency, from his time as assistant to the mayor of St.
