The Liberation of Tolstoy: A Tale of Two Writers

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

Northwestern University Press, 2001 - 364 pages

"Written in 1937, more than two decades after Leo Tolstoy's death, The Liberation of Tolstoy - equal parts biography, memoir, and literary study - serves as a dialogue between two great writers on the proklyatye voprosy, or "damned questions," of life." "Bunin conveys the drama of Tolstoy's last days; his early love and eventual hatred of his wife, Sofya; his relationship with his eccentric family; his difficulties with the Russian Orthodox Church and his embrace of Buddhism; and the politics and events surrounding his funeral. At the same time, this work reflects the drama of Bunin's own difficult circumstances and his search for spiritual deliverance." --Book Jacket.

À propos de l'auteur

Ivan A. Bunin was little known in the United States until he received the Nobel Prize for literature, the first Russian writer to do so. By then he had decades of extensive literary activity behind him. In the intensely group-oriented literary milieu of turn-of-the-century Russia, Bunin largely remained a loner, working within the realist tradition in prose but enriching it with a powerful lyric element. He traveled abroad a great deal and used exotic locales as settings for many of his works. An outspoken opponent of the Bolsheviks, he emigrated to Paris and ironically, years after his death, he became celebrated in the Soviet Union as a major writer. Bunin's themes are diverse, ranging from a changing Russia to the universal human experience. Born into an impoverished rural-gentry family, he often wrote about the decline and passing of a way of life. Sometimes his depiction of provincial Russia is elegiac; at other times it is violent and tragic, as in the novella Dry Valley (1911]). A number of his works, such as the remarkable short story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" (1915), may be read as allegories of human encounter with the transcendent. In later years, Bunin grew increasingly preoccupied with problems of sexual attraction and death, evidenced in his last collection of stories, Dark Avenues (1930). In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Bunin died in 1953.

Informations bibliographiques

• Titre: The Liberation of Tolstoy: A Tale of Two Writers; Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory; Studies in Russian literature and theory
• Auteur: Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
• Rédacteurs: Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Vladimir T. Khmelkov
• Traduit par: Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Vladimir T. Khmelkov
• Collaborateurs: Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Vladimir T. Khmelkov
• Éditeur: Northwestern University Press, 2001
• Original provenant de: l'Université du Michigan
• Numérisé: 19 avr. 2008
• ISBN: 0810117525, 9780810117525
• Longueur: 364 pages