Tolstoy

This volume in the 'Past Masters' series surveys the life and thought of Tolstoy. Tolstoy is of course a great and complicated figure whose two masterpieces ' War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina ' stand at the summit of world - fiction. Gifford tells the story of the landowner, patriarch Tolstoy whose vision of a better world was somehow rooted in the social thought of the eighteenth century. He tells of how Tolstoy made at the center of his vision of community, the ideal of the family. He reads 'War and Peace' in his brief chapter on the subject as a work in which personal connections and relations are always made in terms of family connections. He underlines the uniqueness of Tolstoy's social vision, and his great loneliness in pursuing it. He does not however really begin to explain the miracle of Tolstoy's powerful presentation of reality, his incomparable capacity to make the physical and social worlds come to life. This book provides much information to add to our understanding of Tolstoy , but not in regard to what is most important in him, the miracle of his creative art.