The author states here that Tolstoy was a great educator and his views on education were ingenious and profound. Despite being a great artist, Tolstoy also had pedagogic method and drew abundantly on the stores of science. The book looks at articles which Tolstoy wrote on education and childhood, comparing him frequently to Rousseau, and also outlines the influences of his travels which informed his knowledge of contemporary schooling. The conclusion considers the development of Tolstoy's thought on teaching alongside the state of education at the time the book was first published, in 1923....

The bare events of Dostoevsky's life - his father murdered by peasants, his own ordeal before a firing squad, then exile in Siberia, his epilepsy, gambling, poverty and debts - go far to account for his strange intensity of vision. This biography, first published in 1931, traces his wayward development, from his strict and secluded childhood to his debut as 'literary pimple', through his years of anguish, to his maturity as artist and final apotheosis as Russian patriot.

Written some fifty years after Dostoevsky's death, when the material necessary for a full study first became...

Tolstoy was as much a philosopher as a novelist. From the entries in his early diaries through to the great novels he was constantly searching for a comprehensive vision, equal to 'the confusion of life'. It was in his personal diaries that Tolstoy first attempted a 'literary psychology' to reveal those thoughts and feelings we conceal from ourselves, then inventing the interior monologue to expose the psychology of his characters. Emphasising the importance of these early characteristics for Tolstoy's development as a writer, this volume, published first in 1975, assesses Tolstoy's...