In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy

Abstract

All post-Tolstoy writers, whether Russian or foreign, have had to contend with his image. He and his books stand inescapably there: massive, majestic, seemingly impregnable. Two incompatible Tolstoy's confront each succeeding generation that attempts to understand his oeuvre: on one hand the husband, father, aristocratic landowner and world-famous novelist; on the other the 'humble' prophet of Christian anarchism, anti-cultural 'simplification', and 'a love for others so undifferentiated that it could be bestowed equally on all fellow human beings'. The essays in this volume add some further illumination to the world's quest for an understanding and appreciation of this great Russian master. The contributors address a wide variety of problems concerning the interpretation of Tolstoy's work. Ruth Rischin examines the reverberations of music in Tolstoy's works, while John Weeks analyzes the sound symbolism in Andrei Bolkonsky's death in War and Peace. Concentrating on Anna Karenina, Andrew Wachtel discerns a death-and-resurrection subtext; Irina Gutkin explores Tolstoy's use of Platonic reminiscences; Joan Grossman traces the echoes of the nineteenth-century 'society tale'; and, Hugh McLean focuses on ambiguities in the relationship between real-life models and fictional episodes in the novel. Rounding out the collection, John Kopper focuses on a series of sexual linkages in Tolstoy's late fiction.