| When Tolstoy's final novel Resurrection was published in 1899, it created a sensation and outsold War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It was as if “an angel were to take to novel-writing,” announced one critic in praise of the book. Today the novel is all but forgotten. What happened to Resurrection? |
| Tolstoy’s theory of history, often derided as a distraction or even a farce, has received tragic confirmation again and again from the follies and disasters that have marked the 150 years since the publication of his magnum opus War and Peace. Can it help us grapple with the issues of our own times? |
The author of War and Peace
was one of the great visionaries,
social thinkers and activists in
human history. His reclassification
as a novelist was a calculated
strategy to sanitize his image and
marginalize his supporters in the
aftermath of the Russian
Revolution. It’s time to bring
Tolstoy outside the literary canon
and deal with his legacy as a seer
and radical reformer.
was one of the great visionaries,
social thinkers and activists in
human history. His reclassification
as a novelist was a calculated
strategy to sanitize his image and
marginalize his supporters in the
aftermath of the Russian
Revolution. It’s time to bring
Tolstoy outside the literary canon
and deal with his legacy as a seer
and radical reformer.
After centuries as the most
popular theme for fiction, the
marriage plot is now in disrepute
and gradually disappearing from
all forms of storytelling. Did Leo
Tolstoy's sharp critique of
romance narratives serve as the
tipping point in the decline of
this once cherished genre?
popular theme for fiction, the
marriage plot is now in disrepute
and gradually disappearing from
all forms of storytelling. Did Leo
Tolstoy's sharp critique of
romance narratives serve as the
tipping point in the decline of
this once cherished genre?
Four Essays on Leo Tolstoy
by Ted Gioia
by Ted Gioia
a website devoted to radical,
unconventional and experimental
fiction with a particular focus on
the rise of modernism and its
aftermath.
unconventional and experimental
fiction with a particular focus on
the rise of modernism and its
aftermath.
Publication date: April 18, 2019
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William Gaddis's JR: The
Eleven-Year-Old Tycoon
Harper Lee and the Great
Southern Novel
John Dos Passo's Obsession
with Reflected Light
How Rebecca Got R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Kōbō Abe's Dark Fable
Iain Banks and the Creepy
British Novel
The Adventurer's Guide to
Finnegans Wake
The Rise of the Fragmented
Novel
Virginia Woolf's Orlando
The First Postmodern Novel?
Four Essays on Leo Tolstoy
William Gaddis's The
Recognitions
The Many Lives of James Joyce
A Fresh Look at The Man
Without Qualities
Three Experimental Novels on
Music
Lectures on Proust in a Soviet
Prison Camp
The Novels of John Fowles:
A Reassessment
The Weirdest 1960s Novel of
Them All
The Making of Ulysses
Buddenbrooks and the Novel of
Business
William T. Vollmann and the
Bumbling Shostakovich
Three Existential Horror Novels
Italo Calvino's Winter's Night
Can a Dictionary be a Novel?
William Burroughs, Abstinence
Teacher
Ken Kesey's Novel-in-a-Box
The Magic Mountain and Mein
Kampf
Why Only Revolutions Will Not
be Televised
Three Literary Gossip Novels
My Favorite American Novel
The Finnegans Wake Toolkit
Manhattan Transfer: The
American Novel as Scrapbook
William Burroughs's Mexican
Adventure
Still Golden After All These
Years: A Look Back at Lessing
William Gaddis's Eight Rules of
Unruly Dialogue
A Solipsistic Novel Finds a
Reader
Raymond Queneau's Exercises
in Style
Escape from Mango Street
Revisiting James Joyce's
Dubliners
Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo
Life A User's Manual
A Critic Responds to American
Psycho
Javier Marias's 1300-Page Epic
Novel of Existential Espionage
William Gaddis's JR: The
Eleven-Year-Old Tycoon
Harper Lee and the Great
Southern Novel
John Dos Passo's Obsession
with Reflected Light
How Rebecca Got R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Kōbō Abe's Dark Fable
Iain Banks and the Creepy
British Novel