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“... cycle of life is ‘wringing a meagre drop of consolation from the rags of bad argument’; and Tolstoy – well, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’ is of course a masterpiece, but it is also a ‘conspicuous piece of evasion’. Ivan’s deathbed vision is a deus ex machina which ...”

“... carried out. What an incredible world is opened up in this other non-state of the Gulag! Just as Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century had divided the realm into his own estate of the Oprichnina and the non-estate of the Zemshchina, preying on the latter to foster the former, so in a more technological age Stalin had his official state and his unacknowledged ...”

“... thought, or rather, it was only one of the things he thought. In the novel the line is given to Ivan Karamazov, who explains to his younger brother Alyosha that he began their conversation about religion ‘as stupidly as possible’. When Alyosha asks him why, Ivan first says he wanted to be characteristically ...”

“... all the other characters. Subsequent works contain parodic imitations of Dostoevsky, Platonov, Tolstoy and Akhmatova. As with many writers of the Soviet counterculture, Sorokin’s work did not begin to appear in book form in Russia until the system that had been his main target collapsed. His first collection of stories, written in the early ...”

“... alluding to those moments when a writer appeals to something consensual that everyone knows. Tolstoy uses it with great simplicity and force. In The Death of Ivan Ilich, he describes a group of men who are discussing the recent news of Ivan’s death. ...”

“... of a 19th-century prose writer. He has gleefully scrumped the styles of Dickens, Surtees, Tolstoy, Custine, Thackeray, Eliot, Austen, Gogol and possibly dozens of others – ‘possibly’, because he never names the writers he’s pastiching: it’s up to the reader to identify them. Pastiche is a clubbable form of writing. It’s a way of tipping ...”

“... father and mother (he was not yet born) moved inland to escape the danger. At this time Tolstoy was writing his Sevastopol Sketches, and Bartlett suggests (no reference is given) that many years later, when Tolstoy had become ‘something of a paternal figure’ for the younger writer, ‘the war would be a ...”

“... Fathers and Sons, or even War and Peace, which was a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in reverse, Tolstoy’s paean for the good old aristocracy and good old serfdom. No Russian writer was so sensitive to current feeling and opinion as Dostoevsky – as his first biographer Strakhov put it, ‘he felt thought with unusual liveliness’ – or more adept at ...”

“... Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic War, and at the same time to rewrite War and Peace. Tolstoy’s novel was the only book Grossman read during the war, and he read it twice; War and Peace hangs over Grossman’s book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of Grossman’s achievement is that a comparison between the two books is not ...”

“... without the extensive comment one might hope for); they agree about younger chaps like Zola and Tolstoy; they agree about the lamentable condition of old age which can only be relieved by work (poetry, writes Turgenev, is ‘the bodkin in our backs’). Flaubert makes gifts of cider and cheese, Turgenev replies with salmon and caviar. Both lament the ...”

“... on ‘being a writer’, still privileging beauty over truth and still expecting something from Ivan, the maths graduate she’s fallen for, despite ample evidence that he’s never going to give it. Nothing has happened in Selin’s life in the gap between books one and two. But in the five years since The Idiot was published (and the twenty since it was ...”

“... another nest-of-gentlefolk family tableau around his body, done in reproduction hand-tooled Tolstoy, ending with the words: ‘At last it began to rain.’ The satire concludes with arrests, revelations of how clever Security had been, omens of a hopeless future. It is a clever book, tightly plotted. But there’s a lack of vigour and conviction, as if ...”

“... show from the Tretyakov Gallery to the National Portrait Gallery, Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, were two pictures of famous collectors. The first was of Pavel Tretyakov himself, painted in 1901 by Ilya Repin, showing its tall, willowy subject, arms crossed, in shy, aesthetic half-profile; behind him are some of his holdings of ...”

“... his contacts with, and reactions to, other Russian writers such as Nekrasov, Leskov, Belinsky and Tolstoy (not to mention a grateful obituary of George Sand, whose novels infiltrated subversive Utopian Socialist ideas into Russian culture during Dostoevsky’s youth and exercised an enormous influence). Dostoevsky’s Diary thus illuminates an entire stretch ...”

“... estate of Ismailovo. This may indeed have been English, perhaps even a gift from Elizabeth I to Ivan IV, but Peter first sought tuition in the shipyards of Amsterdam. It was only when the Dutch failed to instruct him ‘in the Mathematical Way’ he required that he repaired to England, ‘and there, in four Months Time, finish’d his Learning, and at his ...”