The Components of War and Peace might be read on one level as a droll riposte to Henry James's critiques of
Tolstoyan formlessness.
Although the interruptions often inspire Turnbull and MacIan to defy the odds and complete their demonstration, the length of time they have been companions has also turned them into friends, and the world fighting against them has made them as much comrades as adversaries: "You are a great chief," MacIan tells Turnbull after their encounter with the
Tolstoyan philosopher, "and it is good to go to war behind you" (47).
In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Padura presents us with an epic,
Tolstoyan novel that mostly succeeds in the ambitious goals he has set for the work.
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.
The book opens, in somewhat daunting
Tolstoyan fashion, with a twelve-page "list of characters.
This ideal summer novel grapples with a
Tolstoyan knapsack overflowing with Serious Themes: Love.
Major organization : ADMINISTRATION LEV
TOLSTOYAN MUNICIPAL DISTRICT OF LIPETSK REGION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
His "sprawling and sometimes tedious" series (Christian Science Monitor) is Homeric or
Tolstoyan in scope, while the violent tenor of this latest novel calls to mind Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Woodcock's approach suggests three main positions: 1) activist anarchism is problematic, but it is still a part of the noble anarchist ideal, 2) the anarchist movement is a realisation of the activist/Bakuninist current and it practically died when the Spanish revolution (and Spanish anarchism) failed (lost) in 1939, 3)
Tolstoyan (and later Gandhian) pacifism is the best face of this (the anarchist) ideal, but in this world this dignified version is doomed to die as well.
It is widely recognized as a blueprint for the feature-length movie and as a showcase for Griffith's
Tolstoyan command of historical narrative, from the battlefield to the front porch.
THE SUREST SIGN THAT A WRITER HAS made his mark is the adoption of his surname in common parlance as an adjective immediately significant even to those who barely know his work, or merely know of it, Dickensian,
Tolstoyan, Proustian, Joycean: this shorthand suffices.
