Edward Crankshaw

Tolstoy (eBook, ePUB)

The Making of a Novelist

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Tolstoy was not always an old man-not always a bearded patriarch fixing the world with the eye of an angry ancient mariner. He started War and Peace when he was thirty five, and Anna Karenina was finished before he was fifty. By then he had fulfilled his genius and deployed all those elements of his titanic temperament which made him world famous. In a richly detailed and sympathetic book on the most creative years of Russia's greatest writer, Edward Crankshaw explores the world of Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the elements in it that contributed to his great art, and the nature of the creative processes involved. Accompanied by evocative illustrations of Tolstoy's life, Mr. Crankshaw's text presents a development of this extraordinary man-his idyllic country childhood and his painful schooling, the wild years of conscience-stricken dissipation, the sojourn among the Cossacks in the Caucasus, the army service in the Crimean War, his entry into Moscow and St. Petersburg literary circles, his fateful marriage. It is an absorbing account which helps us to a fuller understanding of Tolstoy's towering genius-and the limitations that went with it. A wealth of portraits, prints, drawings, photographs and documents illustrate Tolstoy-giving a vivid and unforgettable sense of the Russian world from which the novelist came and which he himself evoked so powerfully.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK
• Seitenzahl: 278
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. September 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781448204779
• Artikelnr.: 38448987

Autorenporträt

Edward Crankshaw (1909 - 1984) was a British writer, translator and commentator on Soviet affairs.

Born in London, Crankshaw was educated in a non-conformist public school, Bishop's Stortford College in Hertfordshire. He began his career as a journalist at The Times, a position he only held for a few months. In the 1930s he lived in Vienna, Austria, teaching English and learning German (his competent grasp of German led him to become part of the British Intelligence service during World War II). On his return to England he went back to working for The Times and also began to write reviews-mostly musical-for The Spectator, The Bookman, and other periodicals. Crankshaw wrote around 40 books on Austrian and Russian subjects and after the war began his research in much more depth. Crankshaw's book on Nazi terror, Gestapo (1956), was widely read; in 1963 he began to produce more ambitious literary works, often on historical or monumental moments in Russian Political history.