Transnational Tolstoy is a welcome and groundbreaking addition to Tolstoy studies, and to the transnational reading of Russian literature generally … In this rewarding volume, John Burt Foster has updated and extended the exhausted genres of ‘Tolstoy and the West’ and ‘Tolstoy and World Literature.’ … Transnational Tolstoy provokes consideration … and plays an exemplary role in opening Tolstoy’s complex ... Read moreposition ‘between the west and the world’ to new and productive approaches.
William Nickell, University of Chicago
Slavic and East European Journal
Transnational Tolstoy is unlike any other current work on Tolstoi today. It provides a refreshing and thought-provoking look at one of the major figures of Russian literature and the dialogues he inspired and initiated around the globe.
Justin Weir, Harvard University
Slavic Review
Foster ... clearly has a gift for condensing his arguments into self-contained, well-expressed units. He also writes with a stylistic finesse and an apparent aversion to generating critical antipathy; his focus is always on saying things as well and persuasively as possible. Judging by his wide cultural knowledge, refined style, and pleasing attitude, he could have been a diplomat.
Cambridge Quarterly Review
Foster's book is a laudable venture into a new critical method of reading great fiction transnationally ... [He] works with splendid erudition and ingenuity ... [to provide] a refreshing and welcome method of reading and understanding Tolstoi.
Modern Language Review
Transnational Tolstoy is a tour de force of old-fashioned comparative literature, taking in, as it does, such a wide selection of authors from such a wide selection of cultures and nations.
The European Legacy
Foster's engaging study makes a crucial point: that, far from being a monologist or solipsist or hegemonic universalist, Tolstoi developed an ever more nuanced recognition of the incredibly complex interplay of different influences on which any cultural product must depend . . . To have returned this magnificently plural Tolstoi to us, as Foster has in lucid and mercifully jargon-free prose, is a substantial achievement.
Jeff Love, Clemson University, US
Slavonic and East European Review
I immensely enjoyed reading John Burt Foster's Transnational Tolstoy, a monumental work that puts Tolstoy at the very heart of world literature, relating his work, and especially War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Hadji Murad, to that of immediate predecessors such as Stendhal, contemporaries like Flaubert, and successors including Malraux and Lampedusa, Premchand and Mahfouz. Fully informed by the most recent thinking on comparative and world literature, yet always wearing its learning lightly, Transnational Tolstoy stands as a guide and an inspiration for literary scholars worldwide.
Theo D'haen, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium, and author of The Routledge Concise History of World Literature In Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World John Burt Foster, Jr., offers a new framework for reading the works of Lev Tolstoy. Often viewed as one of the pillars of 'western' literature, Tolstoy’s works now receive a thorough consideration from a fresh perspective, defining Tolstoy’s art through the concepts of 'transnational' writing and 'global' literature. Foster uses these concepts effectively to open up intriguing sides of Tolstoy’s art and to encourage readers to think differently about Tolstoy. Foster probes the middle-aged and aged Tolstoy’s views of himself as non-Western. Finally, he investigates the ways in which twentieth-century non-Western writers of various stylistic bents—modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial; imagist and magical realist—have engaged with Tolstoy’s art. The result is a stimulating read for literary scholars and the educated public alike.
Edith W. Clowes, Brown-Forman Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia, USA, and author of Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity Transnational Tolstoy is a consistently illuminating and lucidly written examination of Tolstoy as a central figure in the fluid movement of culture around the world. More broadly, this wonderful book is also a methodologically innovative, provocative, and inspiring example of how to conduct literary study in the twenty-first century.
Vladimir Alexandrov, B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Director of Graduate Studies, Yale University, USA Show Less