K.M.Kaung's mini review of Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstoy: A Russian Life -

Mini book review of Tolstoy:  A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett -
by Kyi May Kaung

Usually I don't like reading biographies, as I think biographers are rather shallow and can't keep up with the width and depth and quality of their subjects' intellects.  An exception may be Stacy Schiff's Vera, about Nabokov's wife.

Also, biographers like to tell it as if they were really there, when they were not.  Or like some art historians, they imply things and go off on wild tangents, which may not be acceptable as non-fiction or fact.  Like the popular interpretation of van Gogh's life.

His life and art certainly were more than a lost ear and madness - van Gogh was not even as isolated and misunderstood as he is often depicted as being.

From the first few chapters, Bartlett's Tolstoy is an exception to the mediocre genre. 

She writes for instance, "Driving into Moscow they would have seen --" not "they saw"  -- and although it is all told and not shown, nevertheless she manages to plumb the depths of the serf-based society into which Tolstoy was born, his independence and imagination which started manifesting themselves early in his life, and the colorful characters in his family and extended family going back several generations.

You may not know this, because I think most of you think of me as only Burmese, but I know a lot about Russia and the Soviet Union, and comparable books would be Robert K. Massie on the Russian royalty, Robert Conquest on the great Stalinist Purges, and a recent book on the radioactive substance poisoning of a Russian dissident in London - he was poisoned in a sushi meal, and died within a fortnight or so.

From Bartlett's book, we can see that although Tolstoy's family itself was one of the liberal, progressive and more forward thinking of the Tsars' subject landowning aristocracy, and are not recorded as having mistreated their serfs (in fact, there were several illegitimate children of serf mothers and land owner fathers living with them as wards, usually from neighboring estates) - still one can see the societal tensions and pressures building up to the violence of the October Revolution of 1917.

Tolstoy was not born into, nor lived in a social and economic vacuum.

And he did not create his characters out of thin air either.  Like Dickens, he drew from life.

I am really looking forward to reading and savoring this biography slowly so as to catch all its nuances, and I hope a good film or films is eventually made.

Kyi May Kaung
3rd August 2013