This collection of essays focuses on Tolstoy's writing, thinking and translation problems to commemorate his 150th year of his birth.

Tolstoy's epic novel is one of the most famous pieces of Russian literature and is on the short list of the most important works of literature in the world. This volume examines Tolstoy's unique achievement through a number of thought-provoking essays, and the interplay of the many genres of the text, including historical fiction, war drama, romance and realism.

This book comprises essays to mark the centenary of Dostoyevsky's death in 1881. The first part considers specific works and the second part ranges more widely over aspects of the great novelist's work, including essays on Dostoyevsky as philosopher, on his religious thought and on formalist and structuralist approaches to his work.

A century after Leo Tolstoy's death, the author of War and Peace is widely admired but too often thought of only with reference to his realism and moral sense. The many sides of Tolstoy revealed in these new essays speak to today's readers with astonishing force, relevance, and complexity. In a lively, challenging style, leading scholars range over his long life, from his first work Childhood to the works of his old age like Hadji Murat, and the many genres in which he worked, from the major novels to aphorisms and short stories. The essays present new approaches to his central themes: love, death, religious faith and doubt, violence, the animal kingdom, and war. They also assess his reception both in his lifetime and subsequently. Setting new agendas for the study of this classic author, this volume provides a snapshot of current scholarship on Tolstoy.

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century, Russian literature, give fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the literary life of each Russian author—for Dostoevsky, the 1840s; for Tolstoy, the 1850s. Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for themselves, before their authors were Titans.

ON LIFE AND ESSAYS ON RELIGION BY LEO TOLST6Y Translated with an Introduction by AYLMER MAUDE D. P. R. 1. cc. No. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD LEO TOLSTOY Born, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula August 28 old style September 9, n. s., 1828 Died, Astap6vo, Riazdn November 9 old style November 22, n. s., 1910 I 0n Life was first published in 1887, and the essays between 1894. and 1909. In The Worlds Classics Mr. Aylmer Maudes translation was first published in 1934. 7.-00 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY AYLMER MAUDE . vii ON LIFE. 1887 i RELIGION AND MORALITY. 1894 . . 168 REASON AND RELIGION. 1894 . . 199 HOW TO READ THE GOSPELS. 1896 . 205 PREFACE TO THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING 1 . 1898 . . . . . .209 A REPLY TO THE SYNODS EDICT OF EXCOM MUNICATION. 1901 . . . .214 WHAT IS RELIGION 1902 . . .226 AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY. 1302 . . 282 THE RESTORATION OF HELL. 1903 . . 309 CHURCH AND STATE. 1904 . . .331 THE TEACHING OF JESUS. 1909 . . 347 INDEX 410 INTRODUCTION ON LIFE is Tolst6ys statement of the conclusions he had reached by 1887 after ten years devoted to thought and study on religion. No one acquainted with his life and works can reasonably doubt - that he was one of the frankest and sincerest men who ever lived, but if further evidence on that point were needed, this work would supply it, considering the circumstances under which it was written. By a careful study of the Church creeds Tolstoy had reached the conclusion that they consist of meaningless verbiage and incredible statements which afford no real guidance for life. An even more intense and prolonged study of the Gospels convinced him that the understanding of life held by Jesus was reasonable, andaffords the best possible guidance for life. But it seemed to him that the Church, by declaring the sixty-six books in the Bible to be all equally inspired by God, had reduced them to one dead level, so that the precepts of Jesus are presented as no more divine than the legends of the Old Testament, or the record of the cruel deeds of a jealous Jehovah. More than that, he was convinced that the essential teaching of Jesus has been twisted to link it up with the Jewish Scriptures, and with records interspersed with miracles to attract the belief of an evil and adulterous generation seeking after a sign, and has been misinterpreted in order to secure authority for a Church which when persecuting its rivals has not scrupled to slay thousands of human beings. He therefore defines the Church as power in the hands of certain men. At the very peak of literary success he devoted viii INTRODUCTION ten years of his life to this study of religion, and to clarify his conclusions wrote the works contained in this and another volume, well knowing that their publication would be prohibited, and that even if clandestinely circulated they would call down on him the ridicule of the advanced section of Russian society, then for the most part under the influence of the materialistic philosophy which, following on the success of Darwins teaching, expected ere long to be able to explain man by mechanics and demon strate the senselessness of all religion. To them the fact that the author of War and Peace seriously occupied himself with religion seemed almost to indicate that he had taken leave of his senses. On the other hand the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church, under the guidance of Pobedon6stsev, the lay Headof the Most Holy Synod, actively persecuted dis senters, suppressed books it disapproved of, and though, after some hesitation, it refrained from physically molesting Tolstoy, he knew that he was exposing himself and his friends to danger and incurring the grave displeasure of the authorities of Church and State. He also incurred the dis approval and hostility of his wife, to whom the favour of the powers-that-be was of much concern...