Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy embodies the most extraordinary contradictions. He was a wealthy aristocrat who preached the virtues of poverty and the peasant life, a misogynist who wrote Anna Karenina, and a supreme writer who declared, "Literature is rubbish." From Tolstoy's famously bad marriage to his enormously successful career, Troyat presents a brilliant portrait that reads like an epic novel written by Tolstoy himself. Kirkus Reviews Troyat (the nom de plume of Russian-born Lev Tarasov) won numerous awards in France for his novels and nonfiction, especially his literary biographies. His life of Tolstoy, long an essential work for students and fans of the Russian novelist, here joins Grove's Great Lives series—and "great," in this case, is certainly no hype. When Kirkus reviewed the original English edition (Oct. 15, 1967, p.1305), we noticed that this "panoramic" study brilliantly charted Tolstoy's "titanic struggles . . . to keep his complex, dispiriting love-hate relationship with life from wringing him dry." Troyat carefully reconstructed the six years of work that emerged as War and Peace, and he chronicled Tolstoy's "all-consuming doubt in the viability, indeed the moral worth, of the imagination." While attending to the everyday events in Tolstoy's life—his marriage, his literary friendships, his voluntary poverty—Troyat narrated "a tremendous story, surprisingly modern." Our final verdict: a "beautiful book." "Unique in his own age and a phenomenon in any, Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand, was a diplomat and statesman of outstanding ability and extraordinary contradictions. At once bishop and libertine, iconoclast and traditionalist, he made himself indispensable and held high office in five successive reigns." "From the Revolutionary regime, through exile in America, to new eminence under Napoleon, Talleyrand plotted his way to the restoration of the Bourbons and his own crowning achievement - winning an effective voice for France in the settlement of Europe at the Congress of Vienna - and served a further twenty years before he retired, at eighty, under the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe. Duff Coopers classic biography charts his fascinating, checkered career with all the vigor, elegance, and intellect of its remarkable subject."--Jacket A biography of nineteenth-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, discussing his childhood and youth, his stint in the military, his discovery of Europe, his relationships, and his writing