A century after Leo Tolstoy's death, the author of War and Peace is widely admired but too often thought of only with reference to his realism and moral sense. The many sides of Tolstoy revealed in these new essays speak to today's readers with astonishing force, relevance, and complexity. In a lively, challenging style, leading scholars range over his long life, from his first work Childhood to the works of his old age like Hadji Murat, and the many genres in which he worked, from the major novels to aphorisms and short stories. The essays present new approaches to his central themes: love, death, religious faith and doubt, violence, the animal kingdom, and war. They also assess his reception both in his lifetime and subsequently. Setting new agendas for the study of this classic author, this volume provides a snapshot of current scholarship on Tolstoy.

Product Description: Russian psychological prose has made a distinct contribution to world culture―not only to literature, but also to practical psychology and even to neuropsychology. Consequences of Consciousness focuses primarily on Russian ideas of the self and subjectivity, and how these ideas find expression in the fiction of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy―the most important founding authors of the Russian school of psychological realism...read more