Leo Tolstoy Moulin, Dan
2011, 2014, 2014-10-23, Letnik:
19
eBook, Book
Anglophone educationalists have sporadically taken an interest in Tolstoy's educational ‘philosophy’ but they have seldom consulted the writer's thought beyond the 1860s, or explored its intimate ...relationship with the novelist's creative and spiritual evolution. This book tells the untold story of Tolstoy's life-long interest in education, as revealed in his fiction, non-fiction and social activism. It is argued that Tolstoy's educational works were not a dilettante side-track from his literary career, but an integral part of the development of his literature and wider thought, as well as becoming a vital facet of his mature worldview. After drawing together significant themes from Tolstoy's writings spanning 1852 to 1910, the book evaluates Tolstoy's contribution to educational thought with regards to some of the perennial problems of the philosophy of education, arguing that Tolstoy's views are worthy of consideration by educationists, perhaps more today than in Tolstoy's own lifetime.
Joe Andrew and Robert Reid assemble thirteen analytical discussions of Tolstoi's key works, written by leading scholars from around the world. The works studied cover almost the entire length of ...Tolstoi's career; the analyses present unique insights into Tolstoi's artistic world.
What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives explores this unprecedented question on the rich ground of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s fiction. Each author discovered techniques for ...intensifying the aesthetic illusion Kitzinger calls mimetic life: the reader’s sense of a character’s embodied existence. Both authors tested the limits of that illusion by pushing it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds. Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and other novels, Kitzinger traces the productive tension between these impulses. She shows how these lifelike characters are made, and why the authors’ dreams of carrying the illusion of life beyond the novel fail. Kitzinger challenges the contemporary truism that novels educate by providing models for the perspectives of others. The realist novel’s power to create compelling fictional persons underscores its resources as a form for thought, and its limits as a source of change.
"My aim is to present Tolstoy's work as he may have understood it himself," writes Donna Orwin. Reconstructing the intellectual and psychic struggles behind the masterpieces of his early and middle ...age, this major study covers the period during which he wroteThe Cossacks,War and Peace, andAnna Karenina. Orwin uses the tools of biography, intellectual and literary history, and textual analysis to explain how Tolstoy's tormented search for moral certainty unfolded, creating fundamental differences among the great novels of the "pre-crisis" period.
Distinguished by its historical emphasis, this book demonstrates that the great novelist, who had once seen a fundamental harmony between human conscience and nature's vitality, began eventually to believe in a dangerous rift between the two: during the years discussed here, Tolstoy moved gradually from a celebration of life to instruction about its moral dimensions. Paying special attention to Tolstoy's reading of Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and the Russian thinker N. N. Strakhov, Orwin also explores numerous other influences on his thought. In so doing, she shows how his philosophical and emotional conflicts changed form but continued unabated--until, with his religious conversion of 1880, he surrendered his long attempt to make sense of life through art alone.
In the middle of the night of October 28, 1910, Leo Tolstoy, the most famous man in Russia, vanished. A secular saint revered for his literary genius, pacificism, and dedication to the earth and the ...poor, Tolstoy had left his home in secret to embark on a final journey. His disappearance immediately became a national sensation. Two days later he was located at a monastery, but was soon gone again. When he turned up next at Astapovo, a small, remote railway station, all of Russia was following the story. As he lay dying of pneumonia, he became the hero of a national narrative of immense significance.
InThe Death of Tolstoy, William Nickell describes a Russia engaged in a war of words over how this story should be told. The Orthodox Church, which had excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901, first argued that he had returned to the fold and then came out against his beliefs more vehemently than ever. Police spies sent by the state tracked his every move, fearing that his death would embolden his millions of supporters among the young, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia. Representatives of the press converged on the stationhouse at Astapovo where Tolstoy lay ill, turning his death into a feverish media event that strikingly anticipated today's no-limits coverage of celebrity lives-and deaths.
Drawing on newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, police reports, secret circulars, telegrams, letters, and memoirs, Nickell shows the public spectacle of Tolstoy's last days to be a vivid reflection of a fragile, anxious empire on the eve of war and revolution.
In Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Susanne Fusso examines Mikhail Katkov's literary career without vilification or canonization, focusing on the ways in which his nationalism fueled his ...drive to create a canon of Russian literature and support its recognition around the world. In each chapter, Fusso considers Katkov's relationship with a major Russian literary figure. In addition to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, she explores Katkov's interactions with Vissarion Belinsky, Evgeniia Tur, and the legacy of Aleksandr Pushkin. This groundbreaking study will fascinate scholars, students, and general readers interested in Russian literature and literary history.
There is nothing new about the Russian conservatism Putin stands for, acclaimed writer Lesley Chamberlain argues. Rather, as Ministry of Darkness reveals, the roots of Russian conservatism can be ...traced back to the 19th century when Count Uvarov's notorious cry of 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality!' rang through the streets of Russia. Sergei Uvarov was no straightforward conservative; indeed, this man was at once both the pioneering educational reformer who founded the Arzamas Writers’ Club to which Pushkin belonged, and the Minister who tyrannised and censored Russia’s literary scene. How, then, do we reconcile such extreme contradictions in one person? Through Chamberlain’s intimate examination of Uvarov’s life and skilled analysis of Russian conservatism, readers learn how the many paradoxes that dominated Uvarov’s personal and political life are those which, writ large, have forged the identity of conservative modern Russia and its relationship with the West. This fascinating book sheds new light on an often overlooked historical actor and offers a timely assessment of the 19th-century ‘Russian predicament’. In doing so, Chamberlain teases out the reasons why the country continues to baffle Western observers and policymakers, making this essential reading both students of Russian history and those who want to further understand Russia as it is today
Tolstoy On War McPeak, Rick; Orwin, Donna Tussing
09/2012
eBook
In 1812, Napoleon launched his fateful invasion of Russia. Five decades later, Leo Tolstoy publishedWar and Peace, a fictional representation of the era that is one of the most celebrated novels in ...world literature. The novel contains a coherent (though much disputed) philosophy of history and portrays the history and military strategy of its time in a manner that offers lessons for the soldiers of today. To mark the two hundredth anniversary of the French invasion of Russia and acknowledge the importance of Tolstoy's novel for our historical memory of its central events, Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin have assembled a distinguished group of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds-literary criticism, history, social science, and philosophy-to provide fresh readings of the novel.
The essays inTolstoy On Warfocus primarily on the novel's depictions of war and history, and the range of responses suggests that these remain inexhaustible topics of debate. The result is a volume that opens fruitful new avenues of understandingWar and Peacewhile providing a range of perspectives and interpretations without parallel in the vast literature on the novel.