TOLSTOY

Troyat (the nom de plume of Russian-born Lev Tarasov) won numerous awards in France for his novels and nonfiction, especially his literary biographies. His life of Tolstoy, long an essential work for students and fans of the Russian novelist, here joins Grove’s Great Lives series—and “great,” in this case, is certainly no hype. When Kirkus reviewed the original English edition (Oct. 15, 1967, p.1305), we noticed that this “panoramic” study brilliantly charted Tolstoy’s “titanic struggles . . . to keep his complex, dispiriting love-hate relationship with life from wringing him dry.” Troyat carefully reconstructed the six years of work that emerged as War and Peace, and he chronicled Tolstoy’s “all-consuming doubt in the viability, indeed the moral worth, of the imagination.” While attending to the everyday events in Tolstoy’s life—his marriage, his literary friendships, his voluntary poverty—Troyat narrated “a tremendous story, surprisingly modern.” Our final verdict: a “beautiful book.”