Longlist
The Rebel's Clinic The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
Adam Shatz
Tolstoy
A Russian Life
Rosamund Bartlett
A hundred years ago in November 1910 Count Leo Tolstoy died on a remote Russian railway station, attended by the world's media, taken ill as he was finally attempting to escape his decadent (as he saw it), aristocratic family life. Tolstoy has been universally recognised as a colossus of world literature whether by his contemporaries or critics. In this exceptional biography Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on the many fascinating new sources which have been published about Tolstoy since the collapse of Communism to write about one of the most compelling, maddening, brilliant and contrary people who has ever lived. She and we discover a remarkable and long life in one of the most fascinating and turbulent periods of Russian history, straddling the 19th and early 20th centuries. Tolstoy spent that life rebelling - not only against conventional ideas about literature and art but against traditional education and eventually against family life, organised religion and the state.
- First published:
- 2010
- Published by:
- Profile Books
- Length:
- Hardcover 544 pages
About the author
Rosamund Bartlett was born in London. She holds a doctorate from Oxford, and spent fifteen years pursuing an academic career, latterly as Reader in Russian at the University of Durham, before becoming a full-time writer, translator and lecturer. She continues to maintain an active scholarly profile in Russian literature, music and cultural history, and has held fellowships at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the European University Institute in Florence. She is a recent Honorary Research Associate at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. In 2015 she was awarded the Mary Zirin prize by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies
She is the author and editor of several books, including Wagner and Russia, Shostakovich in Context, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. She has also received recognition as a translator, having edited the first unexpurgated collection of Chekhov’s letters for Penguin Classics, and produced the first new translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World’s Classics in 96 years. Her Chekhov anthology About Love and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
