Posts Tagged ‘War and Peace’
The Humane Russia I Love, The Brutal Russia I Hate
As someone who’s dedicated much of my professional life to studying Russian literature and culture, I’m following the tragic war in Ukraine with great interest and sadness. It is teaching me lessons both personal and political: how dictatorships work, how bullies maintain their grip on power, how leaders’ deep inferiority complexes often masquerade as superiority…
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 More