Two On Tolstoy

We would be remiss if we did not mention that our fastidious, erudite, and diligent book reviewer, Bob Blaisdell, has two new books out.

Readers may already know that Bob is the author of Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius, about the turning point year in Chekhov’s life that led to his becoming one of the world’s greatest authors. He also wrote Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine, about Tolstoy’s creation of that masterpiece. These are just the latest steps in his long and distinguished teaching, editing, and writing career, in which he has written about everything from Frederick Douglass to Karl Ove Knausgaard, from philosophy to literature. 

Bob has been contributing to Russian Life since 2018, and we are very lucky to have his regular contributions and thoughts in our Under Review section. A longtime Russophile, Bob began learning Russian relatively late in his career, so that he could read Russian literature in the original. 

The first of Bob’s new books, Tolstoy, in Search of Truth and Meaning, is a compilation of Tolstoy’s inspirational thoughts, taken from his novels, letters, conversations, and more, that chronicle Tolstoy’s long and ardent search for meaning. Organized by the stages of a person’s life, and with quotes that range from pithy quips to longer graphs from novels and letters, this would be an excellent journal-side book for an aspiring writer to pick up daily, using it as a prompt to ruminate on important ideas and observations. Even aside from that, it is somehow heartening to read Tolstoy’s thoughts and see how little our concerns have changed in 150 years…

“If only men would believe that strength is not in force but in truth, and would boldly utter it, or at least would not depart from it in word and deed, would not say what they do not think, would not do what they consider wrong and stupid.”

The second book is a selection of five of Tolstoy’s stories from later in life, when he was really grappling with life’s meaning: “God Sees the Truth but Waits,” “What Men Live By,” “Where Love is, There God is Also,” “The Three Hermits,” and “Divine and Human.” Bob translated the first and last of these stories and edited the entire collection.

Taken together, these two books (published by Dover) offer a stark alternative to spending one’s time doomscrolling as a drone in the attention economy. Put the screen aside and pick up one or both of these slim volumes and do a bit of thinking about our place in the world, and what Tolstoy might have thought about our world today.