Tolstoy: The Making of a Novelist

by Edward Crankshaw

Tolstoy was not always an old man-not always a bearded patriarch fixing the world with the eye of an angry ancient mariner. He started War and Peace" "when he was thirty five, and Anna" "Karenina" "was finished before he was fifty. By then he had fulfilled his genius and deployed all those elements of his titanic temperament which made him world famous. In a richly detailed and sympathetic book on the most creative years of Russia's greatest writer, Edward Crankshaw explores the world of Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the elements in it that contributed to his great art, and the nature of the creative processes involved. Accompanied by evocative illustrations of Tolstoy's life, Mr. Crankshaw's text presents a development of this extraordinary man-his idyllic country childhood and his painful schooling, the wild years of conscience-stricken dissipation, the sojourn among the Cossacks in the Caucasus, the army service in the Crimean War, his entry into Moscow and St. Petersburg literary circles, his fateful marriage. It is an absorbing account which helps us to a fuller understanding of Tolstoy's towering genius-and the limitations that went with it.

Genres: Russian Literature

276 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Edward Crankshaw (3 January 1909 – 30 November 1984), was a British writer, translator and commentator on Soviet affairs.

Born in London, Crankshaw was educated in the Nonconformist public school, Bishop's Stortford College, Hertfordshire, England. He started working as a journalist for a few months at The Times. In the 1930s he lived in Vienna, Austria, teaching English and learning German. He witnessed Adolf Hitler's Austro-German union in 1938, and predicted the Second World War while living there.

In 1940 Crankshaw was contacted by the Secret Intelligence Service because of his knowledge of German. During World War II Crankshaw served as a 'Y' (Signals Intelligence) officer in the British Army. From 1941 to 1943 he was assigned to the British Military Mission in Moscow, where he served initially as an Army 'Y' specialist and later as the accredited representative of the British 'Y' services, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Following a breakdown in 'Y' cooperation with the Soviet General Staff in December 1942, the British 'Y' Board recalled Crankshaw to London in February 1943. In May he was assigned to Bletchley Park, where he served as a liaison officer on matters pertaining to Russia.

From 1947 to 1968 he worked for the British newspaper The Observer. He died in 1984 in Hawkhurst, Kent.

Crankshaw wrote around 40 books on Austrian, (Vienna; Vienna, the Image of a Culture in Decline; Fall of the House of Habsburg; Gestapo. Instrument of Tyranny; Maria Theresa; Bismarck; The Habsburgs: a dynasty...) and Russian subjects, (Britain and Russia; Putting up with the Russians; Tolstoy: The making of a novelist; Russia without Stalin; The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia's Drift to Revolution, 1825–1917; Khrushchev; Khrushchev Remembers; The New Cold War, Moscow vs. Pekin; preface to Grigory Klimov's The Terror Machine).

(source: wikipedia)

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew nothing about Tolstoy except reading his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karina. An aristocrat, autocrat and opinionated man. What a life? Fighting in the Crimean War, a womaniser, argumentative writing genius. The interesting aspect in the book is how he drew on his own life in his stories. In the end he lived into his 80s and had a life that he was dissatisfied with yet incredible in its achievements.

[Albemarle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an eye-opener! I thought of not reading this book – thank God I did! A troubled and at times immensely cruel man, it seems. Most interesting was his approach to War and Peace (amazing descriptions of people and events, yet without mystery or poetry) and Anna Karenina (a relapse towards a more human and accepting description of a ‘fallen’ yet elegant woman. The constant connections between incidents in his life and his novels was an important element, as was the Russian soul, so evident in the younger Dostoevsky.

[Emily]

Jonathan's great uncle! A wonderfully accessible Russian historian. Great stuff!