A work of dogged research helps elucidate Tolstoy’s late-life conversion.
A Canadian biographer examines Leo Tolstoy’s enigmatic love/friendship, which was steeped in shared Christian values.
With access to heretofore unavailable archival material suppressed during the Soviet era due to its problematic Christian and homoerotic elements, Popoff (The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants, 2012, etc.) unearths details of Tolstoy’s relationship with a handsome, younger, manipulative Russian aristocratic, Vladimir Chertkov (1854-1936), who seems to have had a huge influence over the novelist’s final writings. When Tolstoy first met Chertkov, a former officer in the czar’s Horse Guards who became an evangelical Christian during the so-called Petersburg revival of the 1870s, the great novelist, in his mid-50s, had undergone his own conversion and renounced his previous literary work in favor of dogmatic religious texts based on the teachings of Jesus. At 29, Chertkov, whose forebears moved in exalted aristocratic circles and whose father may have been Alexander II, ingratiated himself with Tolstoy through his heartfelt confessions of faith and sin and their like-minded views of Christian faith and nonviolence. Their mutual confessions of “shameful thoughts” and sharing of diary entries (often destroyed) cemented a secretive bond between them, allowing Tolstoy to vent his frustrations about his wife, Sophia, and family. At first, Sophia was taken by the charming aristocrat, though Tolstoy’s decision in 1885 to renounce copyright of his works from then on when he and Chertkov began their evangelical press hurt Sophia’s income from Tolstoy’s earlier collected works. Moreover, notes Popoff, Chertkov steered the direction of the master’s numerous stories and even pressed him to change endings. In the end, Popoff finds only a nefarious influence in Chertkov, although Tolstoy dearly loved him, leading eventually to Tolstoy’s disastrous abandonment of his family and his death.
A work of dogged research helps elucidate Tolstoy’s late-life conversion.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1605986401
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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