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All posts tagged War and Peace

Russian Thought lecture 7: Tolstoy: from Christian love to Christian anarchism

Readings: L. N. Tolstoy, “A Confession” (1879), “The Law of Violence and the Law of Love” (1908), “Postface to The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) We now move onto Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) who was not only one of the most important novelists in the nineteenth century, but also one of Russia’s most important thinkers. But while nobody would […]

Russian thought lecture 4: Nihilism and the birth of Russian radicalism: from science to art

Readings: Nikolai Chernyshevsky, extracts from “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy” (1860); Dmitry Pisarev, “The Realists” (1864) and “The Thinking Proletariat” (1865) We’re now moving away from the debate that arose initially out of Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter” and dominated Russian intellectual life in the 1830s and 1840s. In the next generation a different set of […]

Russians in London: Lev Tolstoy

There are two sources devoted solely to Tolstoy’s two-week stay in London in March 1861, Victor Lucas’s book Tolstoy in London (1979), and A. V. Knowles’s snappily titled article, ‘Some Aspects of L. N. Tolstoy’s Visit to London in 1861: An Examination of the Evidence’ (1978). They’re very different, but share a similar and telling fault: […]