Boris Eikhenbaum
Tolstoi in the Seventies.
Ardis, 1981. First edition. 0882334727 174 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.5", is bound in red cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book shows very light wear. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright. Dust jacket shows light shelfwear.
"The decade of the 1870s was the decade of "Anna Karenina", and Tolstoi's great novel is the center of this part of Eikhenbaum's monumental trilogy on Tolstoi. Everything from the genesis of the novel to its critical reception is explored.
But the 1870s were also Tolstoi's last years as a writer in the normal sense. Tolstoi renounced both "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina"; and after the spiritual crisis which resulted in such works as the "Confession" (1880), Tolstoi never again returned to the kind of fiction which made him famous. This fascinating crisis is the central concern of "Tolstoi in the Seventies".
All of Eikhenbaum's work on Tolstoi in the 1860s and 1870s combines biography, social history, and literary criticism; he is humanist in the broadest sense, and his books on Tolstoi are among the greatest achievements in Russian literary history."