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
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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