TOLSTOY: A Biography

by A.N. Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 22, 1988

The best Tolstoy life in English, at least since Aylmer Maude's ground-breaking, firsthand Life of Tolstoy, and the best critical weighing since George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky: An Essay in Contrast. A colossus must always daunt his biographer, but Tolstoy has special problems, one being that sentence by sentence he is so much more hypnotic and idea-rich than anyone speaking about him. Tolstoy's superawareness, moral directness, and simplicity sprang from an overdeveloped consciousness that Wilson likens to a prickly sense of perfect pitch that makes most music intolerable--a consciousness giving Tolstoy a godlike ableness to slip into the minds not only of human characters but also of a horse or clog or bear or mother wolf. Through the scrubbed-window brilliance of Tolstoy's words, this gift can strike a reader dumb, even change his life. It also led the Russian seer into blind alleys that Wilson deplores: that art must be redemptive; that celibacy as practiced by the American Shakers and touted by Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata is best. Tolstoy himself could not practice it: ""I am a dirty, libidinous old man."" Wilson's Tolstoy, both man and artist, arises from variations on the basic theme of spiritual transformation against the counterpoint of marital discord. Wilson's point of view is that former biographers have long mistaken Tolstoy's ""confessional"" fiction as only lightly veiled fact (Wilson points out time and again where accepted ""fact"" simply isn't fact); and that Tolstoy's midlife conversion was a disaster, followed in the next 30 years by no artistic success to match War and Peace or Anna Karenina Only here and there do small masterpieces--and the wonderfully rough art of Resurrection--arise. Wilson shows that the Sermon on the Mount was ""a counsel of craziness"" for Tolstoy: ""Tolstoy's religion is ultimately the most searching criticism of Christianity which there is. He shows that it does not work."" Nipping and biting, Wilson engages Tolstoy as a man, unsparingly, unwaveringly. This life stands alone.

Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1988

ISBN: 0393321223

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION