Word: troyat
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TOLSTOY, by Henri Troyat. The paradoxes, inconsistencies and greatness of Tolstoy's life and art are brilliantly recreated in the most thorough biography to date of the Russian literary giant...
...Henri Troyat, Russian-born novelist, biographer of Dostoevsky and Pushkin and member of the French Academy, is well aware of the dangers of attempting to "explain" Tolstoy. Instead of offering absolute answers, he approaches his immense task with unflagging respect and fascination for the conflicting variety of ideas and emotions that filled Tolstoy's 82 years. His exhaustive but never exhausting chronology provides a picture of Tolstoy the man, as complete as can be found in any one book. What gives the biography its great stature, however, is not so much its bulk as the masterly stance Troyat takes...
...tossed off cocktails made of vodka, gunpowder and congealed blood. But he also kept a list of puritanical Rules of Life, which he usually updated during the tormented periods of guilt that almost always followed his revels. Even his searing self-rebuke often seemed gluttonous. He was, says Troyat in one of the book's few sprightly phrases, "a billy-goat pining for purity...
...Crimea, Tolstoy served bravely as an artillery officer and wrote Sevastopol Sketches, which, in their fidelity to the sweep and detail of battle, rank as some of the best war correspondence of all time. The very flaws and inconsistencies that he displayed during those years would, as Troyat notes, "later enable him to embrace the attitudes of each of his characters in turn with equal sincerity." Indeed, contradiction was a pattern that grew and intensified throughout Tolstoy's life: he was a great artist who denounced art, a nobleman who yearned to be a peasant, a preacher of humility...
...addition, he extolled the virtues of family life at the same time that he neglected his own. And it is this contradiction that Troyat documents with special warmth-particularly the love-hate relationship between Tolstoy and his wife Sonya. Troyat's portrait of Sonya is considerably more sympathetic than that drawn by most other biographers. During 48 years of marriage, which started with a brutal wedding-night struggle that left the inexperienced bride sexually unresponsive for the rest of her life, she bore his children, efficiently managed Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate, transcribed his chicken scratches into legible manuscripts...