Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed

Reviews / Votes

"A marvelously engaging, lucid road map to one of the world's most fertile and infuriating creative minds. In a series of deep readings in deft philosophical frames, Jeff Love returns to Tolstoy his magnificent strangeness while at the same time increasing the comfort zone of home." - Caryl Emerson, Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA "...the source of that puzzlement in the complexity and fecundity of Tolstoy's experience of life is intensely illuminated." Modern Language Review, 104.4, 2009 'It is pleasing to see new academic possibilities being opened up in a work marketed primarily at students and the general reader.' "Jeff Love's Guide provides a highly abstracted, often daring, yet persuasive distillation of the major works of Tolstoy. Wonderfully organized by genre and written in clear, practical language... this compact book discerns profound and consistent patterns amidst a great variety of the author's writings... He derives numerous insights that one longs to apply to works by other authors... would serve as a useful introduction to Tolstoy's work... My own experience is that it also provides a stimulating, indeed challenging, afterword for those closely familiar with his works." - Slavic and East European Journal Featured in article on new Beckett books in The Jewish Daily Forward.