Tolstoy

Starred review from July 25, 2011
Coming after the centennial of Tolstoy's (1828â1910) death, this biography is worth the extra year's wait. The cliché "larger than lifeâ only begins to describe Tolstoy's complexity: something of a saint, though excommunicated by the Orthodox Church; animal-rights advocate who early on hunted for sport; champion of married chastity, though he fathered a string of children; master of an estate while dressing like a peasant. Bartlett (Chekhov: Secrets from a Life) has no problem compacting all this while also scrupulously examining Tolstoy's understandably rocky relationships with family members. His revolutionary ideas on class and culture caused a serious rift with his wife, Sonya, before a series of partial and tragic reconciliations. Given the volume of Tolstoy's literary production, Bartlett wisely avoids evaluating the work beyond what is necessary to telling the life and situating it in its time. Her deep and easy familiarity with her subject and the period permits Bartlett to touch on both the thinkers and writers who engaged Tolstoyâsuch as Rousseau, Dickens, and Schopenhauerâwhile getting to the essence of the spiritual power that informs his work. Bartlett is particularly adept at assessing Tolstoy's impact, from the role his work played in bringing about the fall of the Romanovs, an image the Soviets highlighted, to how Tolstoy remains subversive in Russia today. 16 pages of photos, map.

August 1, 2011

Cultural historian and translator Bartlett (Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, 2004, etc.) unravels the ornate and complicated tapestry of the life of the great Russian writer.

Count Tolstoy (a title he later eschewed) lived more than several lives, and Bartlett explores them all with understanding and a sympathetic but also critical eye. Born into a privileged class, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) did not distinguish himself early on and seemed determined to investigate all the sordid alternatives available to a young man of property—alcohol, gambling (he had to sell entire villages to pay his considerable debts), lassitude and lust. At university, he neglected the curriculum and pursued his own interests—he was smitten with Pushkin, Dickens, Trollope, Rousseau and, significantly, Diogenes). For some of his early years, Bartlett can offer only speculations (few records exist), but when he went off to war in the early 1850s, the narrative accelerates. Tolstoy was a fine soldier, though he later renounced violence of all sorts (he became a vegan, quit hunting and took up bicycling). While in the military, he continued writing, and the flow of words surged ever more thickly for the next half-century. Bartlett does not linger overlong on any of his most celebrated works, though she does point out that he used family members in War and Peace and employed an actual case of suicide under a train to inform Anna Karenina. The author is most attentive to the growing celebrity of Tolstoy—and the emergence of groups of devoted followers, especially when he began to embrace his own form of Christianity, dress like a peasant, advocate education for the masses and assail violence, the government and the Orthodox church. Bartlett also highlights the great difficulties faced by his wife and attends fully to his postmortem status.

A rich, complex life told in rich, complex prose.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 15, 2011

A scholar of Russian cultural history, Bartlett has set herself the challenge of conveying the mighty (and mightily complex) Tolstoy. The British reviews suggest that she has mostly succeeded (she gets a rave from A.N. Wilson, himself a Tolstoy biographer); just remember that Tolstoy is such a huge mountain to climb. Doubtless this will be much discussed; with a four-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2011
The author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina became the most famous Russian ever within his own long lifetime (18281910), though more for railing against Russia's serfdom, absolute monarchy, and official church than for his towering literary achievement. During his last, most influential years, he inspired a communal agrarian-reform movement, ethically grounded in the teachings of Jesus and dedicated to pacifism and anarchism in religious and social relations. Bartlett portrays him as an egoist nonpareil and a maximalist in everything he did. Once convinced of the truth, he never doubted his own authority, though he did change his mind. An aristocrat of the highest degree, he ignored all disputants, no matter how powerful or how intimateSonya, his wife of 48 years, though devoted to him, suffered for it. Extremely charismatic, possessed of exquisite manners, yet characteristically insufferable, he rode roughshod over anyone in the way of his wrathor his lust (he seduced young peasant women until well into late middle age). Bartlett eschews critique of him, whether literary, philosophical, theological, or psychological, and instead sticks to Tolstoy's actions, his rationales, and the reactions he elicited, relating them in admirably direct, intelligently noncommittal prose. Her Tolstoy biography should become the first resort for everyone drawn to its titanic subject.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)