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“... of his best stories, particularly the early ones, have a remarkable affinity with Chekhov’s. Tolstoy got Chekhov wrong, too, observing of The Darling, which he much admired, that the author had intended to satirise his enthusiastic heroine for her giddy commitment to each lover in turn, but, by writing about her with so much sympathy, had in fact exalted ...”

“... claim in his Introduction. When a long honest novel comes out of Russia today comparisons with Tolstoy are routine – I have made them myself – but in this case it seems worth asking rather more rigorously than usual what they really mean. In the first place, no novel that merely resembled War and Peace could be anything like it, or indeed any ...”

“... history (or both). Isaiah Berlin described an instance of this problem in his characterisation of Tolstoy as a fox, who perceives reality ‘as a collection of separate entities’ and ‘knows many things’, but who, while writing War and Peace, wanted – like the hedgehog – to know one big thing, to present a ‘vast, unitary whole’. ...”

“... that hankers openly after meaning. It is teeming with the kinds of old-fashioned question Tolstoy used to ask. What is a morally acceptable way of living? What constitutes being? And these questions are not asked idly or rhetorically. Each story takes as starting point and paradigm some way of being which (it would seem) can be clearly designed as ...”

“... as she put it, ‘through the bars of my cage’. Her closest colleagues (Zetkin, Franz Mehring, Leo Jogiches) recognised that Jacob, anonymous and reliable, was better suited than any of them to play the role of official prison visitor. Tersely, Jacob explains her own dedication: ‘If there was anything to be done for her, my motto was, “enough is not ...”

“... and Peterkin in Southey’s ballad. Like Blenheim, Zama was a famous victory for someone or other. Tolstoy would have been sceptical, maintaining that no general ever had any control over a battle, in which determined and contingent factors worked themselves out higgledy-piggledy. His model for the process was Borodino, about which Russell Weigley also writes ...”

“... of an asylum inmate with a split personality. You can choose to ‘be’ either ‘Danny’ or ‘Leo’: Leo is a psychotic killer, an expert in ‘combat, evasion, infiltration and assassination techniques’. Manhunt 2 was initially banned by the British Board of Film Classifications and then rescued by the Video Appeals ...”

“... reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime. It has been compared to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also condemned as a melodramatic mishmash. First, Richard Bernstein (last December in the New York Times) called it ‘a startling, piercing work of fiction with a strong claim to being Singer’s masterpiece’. Bernstein kvelled ...”

“... fictional status in the figures of the humanist Signor Settembrini and the Jewish Jesuit Leo Naphta; and finally in Doctor Faustus (1947). In these contexts – that is, in fictional achievements that are wholly free from the destructive pathos of serving a warlike cause – the confrontation reflected on in this book assumes a different function. It ...”

“... He pictures himself, in a confessional fairytale sent to that same friend, the art critic Leo Popper, as a Midas terrified that his touch will turn the women he meets into golden statues. Popper’s letters, which show remarkable sensitivity, advise him ‘not to write a word about “loneliness” for six months’. And in a critique of Die Seele und ...”

“... social theory. For Gay, however, this part of Freud’s output is especially informative. LeBon, Tolstoy and others may have described mass phenomena acutely, he declares, but Freud ‘explained them’. If that strains credulity, it is also hard to counter. When Gay writes, ‘dreams are the disguised and distorted condensations of wishes and recent ...”

“... also change.’ In this sense, a lot of Postmodern art is as realist in its own way as Stendhal or Tolstoy. It is faithful to a world of surfaces, random sensations and schizoid human subjects. Postmodernism takes off when we come to realise that reality itself is now a kind of fiction, a matter of image, virtual wealth, fabricated personalities, media-driven ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things ...”

“... uncertainly forward out of the doors of the church; towards the end, he was inclining towards Tolstoy’s doctrine of a purely immanent kingdom of God. But in a certain sense, his existential thrashing about within the contradictions he had entered in 1880 was quite as religious as anything that had gone on before. The more so because, all the while, a ...”