August 28, 2019

17 Readings on Tolstoy


17 Readings on Tolstoy

On this day in 1828 (Old Style date; New Style the date is September 9), Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. We scoured our archives and offer this list of readings on his life and works.

  1. A short biography of Tolstoy. {online subscription required}
  2. A rumination on reading the great author and on reading in Russian, by Bob Blaisdell.
  3.  A translation of two short stories by Tolstoy, also by Bob Blaisdell.
  4. Seven fun facts about War and Peace, by Eugenia Sokolskaya?
  5. An offsite link to a New Yorker piece by James Wood, on how War and Peace works.
  6. On visiting a Tolstoy retreat outside Samara. {online subscription required}
  7. Visiting Sophia Tolstaya in the kitchen. {online subscription required}
  8. War, Peace and Cable – on the 2016 War and Peace miniseries.
  9. Can you read Anna Karenina every day? Let's find out.
  10. And what about reading Anna Karenina the first time?
  11. A pair of Americans trace Tolstoy's walking journey from Moscow to Tula. {online subscription required}
  12. A book on Tolstoy's final flight and death in a train station. {online subscription required}
  13. On the descendants of the great writer. {online subscription required}
  14. Optina Pustyn – a retreat the Tolstoy favored. {online subscription required}
  15. An article on the central messages in Tolstoy's writings. {online subscription required}
  16. The Christian sect that Tolstoy helped survive with proceeds from one of his final books. {online subscription required}
  17. A recipe for hot apple compote that Tolstoy loved. {online subscription required}
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This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
Turgenev Bilingual

Turgenev Bilingual

A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
The Little Golden Calf

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Dostoyevsky Bilingual

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