tolstoy
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It’s War and Peace, Charlie Brown
For the Kenyon Review blog, Meg Shevenock writes about how Charlie Brown made her scared of Tolstoy’s classic and how she worked to overcome her fear.
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The Unhappy Marriage Rule
For the New York Times‘s Bookends column, authors Charles McGrath and Leslie Jamison share their thoughts about what they perceive to be the best portrayals of marriage in literature. While McGrath argues that the more interesting literary marriages tend to be unhappy…
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A Sonata’s Variation
So now, 125 years after Kreutzer’s 1889 publication, Tolstoy’s wife gets to have her say. Sofiya Tolstoy, indignant about the violent and misogynistic plot of her husband’s The Kreutzer Sonata, wrote a novella in response to the book from the female’s character…
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In Defense of The Novel
For the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman responds to David Shields’s Reality Hunger, primarily using Anna Karenina to defend the powers of the novel.
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Exploring the “Russian Soul”
For the New York Times, Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser share their experiences reading 19th century Russian literature. While Prose shows an appreciation for the timeless themes of Tolstoy and Gogol, Moser contends that what makes 19th century Russian writers distinctive is the…
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Self-Help That’s No Help
At The New Republic, Esther Breger takes a look at literary self-help books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life and Give War and Peace a Chance.
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The Science of Why You Can’t Read Good Literature
Writer Michael Harris discusses digital distraction and reading War and Peace at Salon: But there’s a religious certainty required in order to devote yourself to one thing while cutting off the rest of the world. We don’t know that the…
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Bringing Tolstoy to the West
More people were reading Tolstoy than any other author in translation at the beginning of the 20th century, but as late as the 1880s, few non-Russians had even heard of him. Translators were deterred partly because of the length of…
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The Art of the Novella Subscription Series
Forget magazines—for a small subscription fee, Melville House will send you two novellas every month in whatever format you prefer. It’s the perfect way to finally get around to reading classics like Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and Leo Tolstoy’s…
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What We Become
Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom.
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
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From Russia with Love
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.