Tolstoy's Letters Volume 1: 1828-1879

Professor R. F. Christian is one of the major scholars of Russian literature of the last one hundred years. Most especially he is associated with Tolstoy being accorded the highest praise from authors and critics like A. N. Wilson, Jay Parini and George Steiner. Among his publications are Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace': A Study and his definitive editions of Tolstoy's Letters and Diaries (both in two volumes). The Letters and Diaries as well as his 'War and Peace' book have been reissued in Faber Finds. Professor Christian was born in Liverpool, graduated from Oxford University with a first-class honours degree in Russian, joined the Foreign Office and was Attache at the British Embassy in Moscow. His academic career began at the University of Liverpool. At the University of Birmingham he became Chair of Russian Language and Literature. He moved to the University of St. Andrews from where he retired as Head of the Russian Department. A man of many interests beyond the academic, it has been said of him that 'he has always welcomed change if it led to improvements in standards of teaching and research, but one who has always resisted the idea of change for change's sake.'Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828 -1910) is widely considered one of the greatest novelists of all time, principally for his War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878). George Steiner has praised him as 'a colossus bestriding the palpable earth, evoking the realness, the tangibility, the sensible entirety of concrete experience.' Born in Yasnaya Polyana to a family of old Russian nobility, Tolstoy would abandon his university studies to spend time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, running up significant gambling debts before travelling with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. He began his writing career in the 1850s, publishing an autobiographical trilogy: Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857). He served in the Crimean War and wrote the much-admired Sevastopol Sketches (1855-56). After travelling in Europe Tolstoy settled to family life and the composition of his major works. He would also describe his conversion to Christianity in Confessions (1879) and produce the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1884) and the novel Resurrection (1900) prior to his death in 1910.