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“... long gestation, is a Soviet War and Peace. True, Slezkine says he is writing history, whereas Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally treated, if somewhat gingerly, as a novel; and Slezkine’s subject is not so much war and peace as that curious state between the two that existed in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Second World ...”

“... all that was in Anisya . . . and in every Russian man and woman.’ The moment fits with Tolstoy’s aim to compose a great patriotic epic portraying the unity of the Russian people in the face of foreign invasion. But here, as with all the other creative work he uses, Figes interprets the scene as expressing a fundamental historical truth about ...”

“... then on he has never been short of distinguished admirers. Chekhov and Gogol loved his stories, Tolstoy knew some of them by heart, and Walter Benjamin, Heidegger and Elias Canetti have paid ardent tribute to them. The praise is well deserved. This Treasure Chest strikes me as quite a treasure; and the new edition, with its chaste green jacket and ...”

“... the soldier is not dead, but knee-deep in a grave he is digging for a French boy. In this regard Tolstoy and Stephen Crane may have influenced McEwan. Tolstoy, after all, was praised by the Russian formalists for his talent at defamiliarisation. Nikolai Rostov stands on a wooden ...”

“... which the army used for generations. But perhaps the truest hero of the war was the Russian doctor Nikolai Pirogov. He pioneered field surgery, a technique other countries took many years to catch up with: he used ether to dull the pain, and introduced the system of triage which all armies would come to adopt. Pirogov worked in the Great Hall of the Assembly ...”

“... is the proper price for any good thing.’ This was also the basis of her complaint against Tolstoy and against St Augustine, whose life she was commissioned to write in 1933: he ‘intellectualised with all the force of his genius’ the idea of atonement through suffering. Rebecca set herself to wipe out not guilt but cruelty, by the exercise of ...”

“... the foetus-narrator, expounds his own literary genealogy, which includes Tristram Shandy, Nikolai Gogol, Pierre Menard (author of Don Quixote) and many others of what he calls the ‘Sons of La Mancha’. Fuentes has written elsewhere that Cervantes’s great subject is the ‘madness of reading’, a phrase which sounds much much better in Spanish ...”

“... happiness. There are eight rules by which ‘well-bred people’ live, he told his brother Nikolai in a long letter. You restrain yourself sexually; you do not brag. ‘The truly gifted are always in the shadows, in the crowd, far from exhibitions.’ The last line of this letter has always been soothed into English as ‘You have to relinquish your ...”

“... the rare occasions when they visit Moscow. The result, as the pianist and Conservatoire professor Nikolai Petrov put it, is that ‘we are very near the end of what we were most proud of – the Russian style of playing. The professors work so little with their pupils you cannot tell if it is a Russian playing.’ ‘Near the end’: the theme of exhaustion ...”

“... of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not rejoice at the vict-ories of the ...”

“... an army doctor, apparently died in the late 1860s; his mother was the daughter of the historian Nikolai Polevoi. Acquaintances of the family describe them as ‘overwhelmed by romanticism’, enthralled by the extraordinary, but also rather vain. One of Degaev’s sisters had (misplaced) hopes of a musical career, another was convinced that Petr Lavrov, a ...”

“... remained diffuse and ineffective, and Napoleon might well have won the war. Lieven argues that Tolstoy actually underestimated Russia’s achievement by dismissing the contribution of its generals and statesmen (especially those with German surnames). Making exhaustive use of Russian archives, Lieven explains how the Russian commanders equipped and moved ...”

“... and to stay longer,’ Prokofiev wrote to his old friend and lifelong supporter, the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. More visits followed. Prokofiev was energetically wooed by Levon Atovmyan, a music official with a revolutionary past, who initially approached him – as well as other émigré musicians with an international reputation – at the suggestion ...”

“... and is so deeply committed to the (inevitably verbal) representation of mental images. When Tolstoy, near the end of War and Peace, writes that Nikolai Rostov’s mother, the countess, had been quiet during tea, and then, as everyone finished, suddenly stirred into irritable life, because she ‘clearly wished to find ...”

“... Stalin was a ‘grey blur’ in the opinion of Nikolai Sukhanov, the Menshevik-Internationalist chronicler of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky thought him a faceless ‘creature of the bureaucracy’, even in power. These must be among the most misleading descriptions ever to capture the fancy of generations of historians ...”