The extraordinary character of the giant is captured better by Bartlett than by any previous biographer
Spectator
Superbly readable and, in contrast to some earlier biographies, treats the great novelist's sometimes strange enthusiasms and obsessions sympathetically and seriously.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
Mail on Sunday Books of the Year
Conveys Tolstoy to me ... Read moremore vividly than any biography I have read.
Financial Times
Rosamund Bartlett's new life of Tolstoy is a splendid book - immensely readable, full of fresh details, and often quite brilliant in its perceptiveness about the greatest of Russian writers, and one of the stars in the western firmament. This biography has the sweep and vividness of literature itself, and I strongly recommend it.
Jay Parini, author of The Last Station highly accessible and intelligent... neat and illuminating...Bartlett's biography is worth tackling for four qualities alone. The first is her insight into the many contradictions of Tolstoy's character... Its second merit is the way Bartlett places Tolstoy in the much wider cultural context... The third great strength of Bartlett's biography is the weight she gives both to his philosophical writings, and to his social activism, which is a salutary corrective to those, including his Soviet critics, who concentrate on the great novels to the exclusion of all else... The fourth distinguishing feature, and a considerable one, is Bartlett's relatively sympathetic treatment of the women in Tolstoy's life... bonus throughout is Bartlett's pleasant, unimposing style
Mary Dejevsky
Independent
In the centenary of Leo Tolstoy's death, it was a great pleasure to read Rosamund Bartlett's Tolstoy: A Russian Life...an accessible and scholarly biography of the troubled master of realist fiction which conjures the splendid image of him wobbling around on a bicycle
Richard Godwin
Evening Standard Books of the Year
engaging... In her revelations about the immense difficulties of producing the definitive Collected Works (a task that, under Soviet Communism, proved almost impossible) and in her elucidation of the suppression of Tolstoy's spiritual influence, Bartlett reminds us not only that the great man is not so very long dead, but also that his myth is being made and remade even now
Claire Messud
Daily Telegraph
a splendidly lucid and sympathetic biography
Scotsman
Alan Massie
Impressive
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