Kategoria BISAC: Literary Collections >> Russian & Former Soviet Union

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...

This study concentrates on "The Devils," but also places this novel in the total context of Dostoevsky s work. Also considered is the life and work of T.N. Granovsky, who is satirised along with Turgenev in the novel, and thus offers a useful basis on which to delineate the contours of Dostoevsky s thought. First published in 1991, the book begins from the belief that his "genius embodies much of what is typical of Russian life: his boundless vitality, his extremism, his lack of empiricism and economy. To understand Dostoevsky is therefore somehow to understand Russia."

The author...

The two note-books of the diary of Mme. Dostoevsky, the rough notes of her lengthy Reminiscences, unfinished at the time of her death, all in her own hand-writing, and copies of her husband s letters to her from 1866 to 1881, were found in August 1922.

The "Diary" is a large volume of about 400 pages, published in the original Russian by the Central Archives in 1923. Both note-books relate to the time when the Dostoevskys were living abroad in Berlin, Dresden and Baden whilst the Reminiscences was intended as a complete character portrait.

This volume, first published in 1923,...

Tolstoy s "Anna Karenina "is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels ever written. This study of its morally ambiguous protagonist, Anna, discusses Tolstoy s troubled relation to the feminine in terms of the fantasies, hopes, and fears that she represents.

In "Reflecting on Anna Karenina," first published in 1989, Mary Evans presents an original, feminist reading of Anna s life and times for both students and the general audience. She argues that Anna is the embodiment of all those female characteristics that so captivated Tolstoy, and which he felt so compelled to punish in...

With its demand that works of art be judged according to the their morally didactic content, Tolstoy s reviled aesthetics has seemed to exclude from the canon far too many works widely accepted as masterpieces, including Shakespeare and Beethoven.

This book, first published in 1985, argues that these are not mere oversights on the part of Tolstoy: he knew full well the consequences of his line of reasoning. The author contends that, even if we disagree with and eventually reject much of what Tolstoy concludes, his account of the nature and purpose of art is nevertheless worth...

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...