Details enliven but flaws mar Tolstoy portrait

November 27, 2011|By Alexandra Popoff

This biography of the multitalented Tolstoy suffers from some factual… (AFP/Getty Images/file…)

TOLSTOY: A Russian Life By Rosamund Bartlett

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 544 pp., illustrated, $35

Among the world’s most celebrated novelists, Leo Tolstoy was a man of immense talent, great passions, and boundless curiosity, which drove him to explore every side of life. More than a writer, he was a pedagogue, spiritual leader, and social critic - and as such attained unparalleled authority, equal to that of the czar. His life was bound to Russia, but as Rosamund Bartlett observes in her new biography, Tolstoy lived “more lives than most other Russians.’’

Bartlett relates the over-examined life with abundant fresh detail drawn from Russian sources, such as the comprehensive 90-volume edition of “Tolstoy’s Collected Works.’’ Although not a new source, this collection has been marginally published, and few biographers have used it. The rich material allows detailing Tolstoy’s background to an extent unseen before. Bartlett recreates Tolstoy’s world, introducing the reader to countless people in the writer’s milieu and beyond; their stories are told in endless succession, forming a fascinating tapestry of Russian life.

Despite her sources, Bartlett will disappoint the reader stating, for example, that Tolstoy published “War and Peace’’ “when he was still in his thirties,’’ not at 41, or that he and Sophia had 14 children, instead of 13. Tolstoy’s sexuality has generated many myths, to which Bartlett adds one more by mistranslating his diary entry as a young landowner: Tolstoy supposedly admits that “seducing girls had become a habit.’’ Never mind that the quoted words do not appear in the original entry. Bartlett, who is working on a new translation of “Anna Karenina,’’ provides her own, not always persuasive, translations of Tolstoy’s prose and of his wife Sophia’s diaries.

One also should be wary of apocryphal stories, some of which are given undue credence here. Bartlett tells us that Tolstoy “ordered’’ his wife to hold on and give birth to their first son on June 28, his providential date. While writing “War and Peace,’’ he insisted “that his young wife [be] present, and so Sonya would usually curl up by his feet on the bearskin rug next to his desk.’’ In fact, Sophia came to observe Tolstoy at work, being fascinated with his creativity. Although Bartlett gives Sophia her due for assisting Tolstoy, she also snubs her.