Bob Blaisdell is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough College and the author of Creating Anna Karenina. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor, and the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections, including a collection of Chekhov's love stores. He lives in New York City.
"That Creating Anna Karenina is a major contribution to Tolstoy
scholarship makes it no less of a delight to read. Blaisdell's
passion for the subject, and his always-surprising discoveries
about the great man and his creation, kept me turning the pages
unstoppably. This is a wonderful book."
*Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia, staff writer at The New
Yorker*
“Captivating. How did Anna Karenina evolve from a
trivial high-society adulteress, whom Tolstoy despised, into one of
the deepest, most sensitive tragic heroines in all of literature?
What happened inside Tolstoy to condition this
metamorphosis? Creating Anna Karenina is a worthy
companion to the novel.”
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
In its study of the comings and goings of the Tolstoy household at
the time of the novel’s composition, Creating Anna
Karenina asks if one of the world’s greatest novels was in
fact just as much a product of everyday minutia—like who stops by
for a visit with what kind of gossip to tell—as it was the
culmination of long-simmering ideas about morality and desire.
*The New Republic*
A fuller understanding of any work—and especially of its
creation—requires the resurrection of its creator and his
milieu. Blaisdell manages to do precisely
that.
*Boris Dralyuk, Executive Editor, Los Angeles Review of Books, from
the Foreword*
"Despite scores of biographies in dozens of languages, we know
remarkably little about Tolstoy in the 1870s, a decade when the
writer conceived and wrote Anna Karenina, one of the world’s
best-know and best-loved novels. In Creating Anna Karenina,
Bob Blaisdell is the first to provide a granular, stop-action,
magnifying-glass-level look at the creation of this astonishingly
great book; Blaisdell conjures the novelist’s world, and
painstakingly reveals the overlaps with the world of the novel.
Tolstoy breathed in his world, and exhaled the novel."
*Professor Michael Denner, Editor of Tolstoy Studies Journal*
A riveting account of Tolstoy’s composition of Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy comes to life as a complex individual defying easy
classification. Tolstoy’s fans will relish learning from, and,
occasionally, arguing with Blaisdell’s opinions. This passionate
book is almost impossible to put down.
*Publishers Weekly*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
