Posts Tagged ‘Tolstoy’
If Only Putin Had a Soul, Tolstoy Could Be the One To Save It. Here’s Why.
I wrote this article back in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea. Back then the title was “How Tolstoy Can Save Putin’s Soul.” The tragic stakes are much higher now and Putin’s soul is clearly beyond saving, but the cultural backdrop is still entirely relevant so I wanted to share it with you. The drama being…
Read MoreWhat Mandela Learned From War and Peace: How to Keep Hope Alive in Troubled Times
In Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela singles out War and Peace as a book that had a profound influence on him during his 27-year incarceration. He says that he returned to the novel over and over again, referring to it as his all-time favorite years later. As the world remembers December as the anniversary…
Read MoreHow I Found My Voice and Myself in War and Peace
At a book talk I gave a few years ago, a teenage boy in the audience, intrigued by the stories I’d been telling about young characters’ tortuous journeys in War and Peace, asked me a question during the Q&A. “Did Tolstoy, like, really experience all that?” The ingenuous question got me thinking, not only about…
Read MoreTen Russian Novels You Need To Read To Be a Better Human
As President Trump and Vladimir Put get chummy amid political turmoil at home, serious accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and a general sense of social malaise in both countries, Americans and Russians alike have a lot to think about these days. Both nations would do well to get beyond their ideological differences…
Read MoreWhy Now Is The Time To Give War and Peace a Chance
Summer, for many of us, offers a few of those long, unbroken stretches of time that, unlike the rest of our hurried, fragmented lives, positively cry out for a great big, abiding read. So perhaps this is the moment finally to tackle War and Peace. Widely acknowledged as the greatest novel ever written, War…
Read MoreChanging How Juvenile Offenders See Themselves—One Book at a Time
Duane is an eloquent 19-year-old who enjoys discussing world history and Russian literature. He has taught himself to count in multiple foreign languages and hopes to be an ambassador someday. This is not your typical teen — or youth inmate. He immersed himself in liberal arts while serving a sentence at Beaumont Juvenile Correctional…
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