The Tolstoy Commons

An upper-level course on the writings of Tolstoy at the University of Kansas recently asked students to reflect on how depictions of violence and war in Sevastopol Sketches and Cossacks relate to more contemporary treatments of war in popular culture.

It is difficult to pick up a thick volume titled Life and Fate, learn that it includes a great many characters and is about a war between Russia and another European country – and not think of War and Peace. 

Interview with Tolstoy expert Donna Orwin (University of Toronto) We heard that Donna Orwin had just published a new book on Tolstoy, Simply Tolstoy, and had to find out all about it. Ani Kokobobo: Donna, first of all, congratulations on a

By Robert (Bob) Blaisdell, Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY) Preface The first time I read Anna Karenina, I was eighteen and it took me a little less than three days. I mention that not as a matter

I have heard the song “Return to Innocence” by Enigma many times, and it expresses a soothing ideology. But just what does this mean and is it possible? In Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Ivan Ilych changes from

Tolstoy as a Modern Social Thinker Tolstoy’s ideas about the workings of society and state; his national and global interventions. Are they relevant today? 200-word abstract and 3-page CV by March 15; Edyta Bojanowska (edyta.bojanowska@yale.edu).​

Muireann Maguire is a lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter, UK. She writes the Russian Dinosaur blog where this post originally appeared. When, three years ago now, I was invited to review two new translations of Tolstoy’s great 1877 novel

McGill University students Emily Szpiro and Emma Makin wrote and performed the following skit parodying Tolstoy’s War and Peace for a Tolstoy course taught by Professor Anna Berman. Setting: 70s-style match game Tolstoy: Tonight, live from burning Moscow, we have a lovely bachelorette

Dear Colleagues, The Tolstoy Studies Journal, a peer-reviewed publication issued by the North American Tolstoy Society ​is accepting submissions for the 2018 issue beginning now and continuing until June 1, 2018. We welcome scholarly essays in the 7000-8000 word range about a variety of topics that advance the