Have read Rosamund Bartlett's book on Tolstoy -

I have finished reading Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstoy:  A Russian Life -

However, there were some difficulties or small discontents.  The English sometimes sounds strange to me, and I cannot get used to her saying "near to" instead of "close to" - and then from the very beginning, she refers to Leo or Lev Tolstoy as "Tolstoy," even when she is writing about him in a family setting and calling the other Tolstoy family members - Masha, Tanya, Sergey, Sonya etc. and even while talking about him during his childhood and adolescence.

Then, in the extended family, there are two Mashas, two Tanyas, two Sergeys, two Levs, and when the sentences are close together - it's not clear who she is speaking of.  It becomes like reading a Russian novel, including War and Peace or Anna Karenina.

The only other biography of Tolstoy I have read is Love and Hatred:  The Stormy Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy, which like the movie The Last Station, focuses on the conflict in their later years between Leo and Sonya and the "cog thrown in the wheel" by the arrival of his major disciple and business partner, Chertkov.

I have not read the Jay Parini novel of the same name on which the movie was based. 

The Bartlett book goes into a great deal of detail on Tolstoy's social and political activism and his involvement with "marginal" religious sects,and  his criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church aligned with the Tsarist government, that ended in his excommunication shortly before his death.

The epilogue after Tolstoy's funeral about his family's problems with the Bolshevik government and Lenin and Stalin occupies approximately 30 pages of a 500 page book - and there are copious notes and a bibliography. 

What I find  a bit disconcerting, is Bartlett assumes the reader already knows about recent Soviet and Russian political and economic history.  And the viewpoint is mostly from Tolstoy's point of view.

For instance, she writes "Stalin assumed power" but while Tolstoy's family members, Chertkov and others, were struggling to survive and publish his collected works, the Great Purge, and the Great Famine were going on in the 1930s.

It would have been "nice" to have a summary of the Great Industrialization Debate, regarding how Stalin planned to proceed - and the way he connived, arrested and executed people like Nikolai Bukharin who was subjected to a kangaroo trial and executed, and only rehabilitated in the Gorbachev era.  Lenin died a natural death, but Trotsky was exiled and then assassinated (with an ice pick) in Mexico.

It plays out metaphorically in George Orwell's Animal Farm.

In Animal Farm the innocent people struggle along like the big strong horse and die of exhaustion. 

Bartlett only mentions NEP or the New Economic Policy. which was Bukharin's idea, in passing, when she writes that Chertkov thought he'd have a little less central control of his publishing enterprise during that time.

But the brief thaw did not last.

Of course, adding all that would make the Bartlett book longer, but I think her aim was to present Tolstoy's thoughts and actions on a broad canvas, and without an explanation the aforementioned economic and political changes, it feels as if the book was hastily finished towards the end, and the true irony of Tolstoy and his life's work is not adequately portrayed.

The changes to socialism were in large part due to his proselytizing, and yet all the family property was nationalized, even though by 1917 Tolstoy and his heirs had already given away one third of their land already.

His daughter after three bouts of prison had to leave the USSR in 1929 for good, and never returned.

Today there are a few Tolstoy families remaining in Russia and about 300 descendents scattered all over the world.

Reading this book made me think about Burma, socialism and exiles a lot, but that will be another post.

Kyi May Kaung.
8-12-2013