![]() ![]() His book is what every lover of pre-Revolution Russian literature needs close by: not an academic interpretation, but a reader’s companion. Saunders can neither speak nor read Russian, yet he has studied his adored Russian writers in the faithful, if now slightly fusty, Constance Garnett translations of the 1920s, which remain good enough. Kafkaesque? Gogol’s is less a proto-surrealist fable of identity, Saunders argues, than an exercise in blunt realism, that scrutinizes the topsy-turvy world of Tsarist officialdom. Tolstoy, a moral-ethical giant, towered above his predecessor Gogol, whose satirical short story ‘The Nose’, written in around 1836, relates how a nose detaches itself from the face of a St Petersburg petty official and develops a life of its own. Tolstoy’s is the “kind of story I want to write”, Saunders says, “the kind that stops being writing and starts being life.” ![]() ![]() A wealthy merchant-landowner sets out with his serf across a frozen immensity of tundra, only to get fatally lost. ‘Master and Man’, Tolstoy’s great 1895 parable of social inequality and sacrifice, unfolds in a December snowstorm. If Chekhov is tantalizingly elusive, Tolstoy conjures an atmosphere of impassive Christian grandeur. ![]() New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT. ![]()
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