Lev Tolstoi's interests were diverse and his methods eclectic. Not surprisingly, his writings attract a similar type of scholarship, witnessed by this thought-provoking collection featuring scholars with multiple methodologies and writing styles grappling with a number of issues that hold their relevance for the twenty-first century.

In his “Prologue: Tolstoy's Nihilism,” Jeff Love focuses on Tolstoi's “Nominalism” and his penchant for constructive deconstruction, deconstructive construction, expressing the inexpressible, formalizing formlessness, and other paradoxes that my Marxist teachers back in the Soviet Union called “the unity and the struggle of the opposites.” Michael A. Denner examines Tolstoi as a social theorist, while Daniel Moulin-Stożek articulates the main principles of Tolstoi's educational work. Vladimir M. Paperni traces Tolstoi's attempts to tame and rephrase the mystical tradition into rational discourse; the editor of the collection discusses Tolstoi's thinking and writings on Jews, Judaism, and the plight of Russian Jews; and Jeffrey Brooks writes twenty-three pages on the subject of Tolstoi's Humor (clearly beating any visible competition by at least twenty-two pages). Two essays focus on Tolstoi's aesthetics: Stephen Halliwell scrutinizes Natasha Rostova's seduction scene at the opera and exposes the paradoxes of Tolstoi's theory of “aesthetic seduction,” while Caryl Emerson revisits Tolstoi's polemics with William Shakespeare and Tolstoi's interaction with G.B. Shaw—his unexpected bedfellow in the fight against Bardolatry (Shaw's term). Finally, Ellen Chances produces an elegant overview of Tolstoi's relevance to the twenty-first century, focusing on several aspects of his thought and art that increase in significance and relevance by the day, his artistic rendering of “the art of good aging” in particular.

Any reader will find something of interest in this collection. While all of the essays are erudite, sophisticated, and have something new to say about Tolstoi's art and thought, each is unique in its own way: some will appeal more to a specialist or theorist, others to a general reader. But let me highlight some salient features of these essays first, an ungrateful task, to be sure, especially in the light of the excellent overview that Inessa Medzhibovskaya provides in her introduction to the volume.

Surveying Tolstoi's attack on poverty in his What, Then, Shall We Do? (1886), Denner detects various voices in Tolstoi's essay: philanthropist, naïve, radical—as he clarifies Tolstoi's profound insight into the nature of poverty. Tolstoi exhibits a number of familiar strategies here including the contempt for experts and professionals, in this case, economists, who, similar to other authorities, try to uphold the status quo while residing comfortably in echo chambers. Corrupted by their power and their idleness, the rich—according to Tolstoi—corrupt the poor by instilling in them contempt for regular labor. Scrutinizing various means of state control, coercion, and cooptation, Tolstoi concludes that modern societies obfuscate and diffuse the mechanisms of coercion. Brilliant as Tolstoi's exposé of various means through which “western institutions, particularly liberal pluralistic democracy and civilization control and compromise people” (56), his solution appears rather peculiar and paradoxical: wealthy women have to give birth to as many children as possible and to take care of these children themselves. Logic is simple: “mothers’ work” is “immediate, intuitive, beyond culture, beyond science, beyond authority and beyond control and, therefore, outside the system of violence that is our social system” (55). After thirty nine chapters exposing the tragic tensions of master-slave dialectics, the mutual corruption of the wealthy and the poor, and the corruption that undermines any attempt at social reforms, Tolstoi's recipe is curious and worth pondering; one has a feeling, however, that it has as much chance to gain traction as Tolstoi's attacks on Shakespeare.

While Tolstoi's fixation on disrobing the high and mighty of this world is predictable, his sense of humor is less so. Yet Brooks builds an impressive case, exploring Tolstoi's penchant for various humorous predicaments and situations, including the misadventures of a policeman tied to a bear at the beginning of War and Peace. Brooks also discusses the variants of Russian humor (ridicule, holy foolishness, carnivalesque) that find their traces in Tolstoi, while pointing to Tolstoi's audience's resistance to appreciate his humor. Yet this resistance of readers of high literature found its counterpart in the satirical journals of the period, Iskra in particular, whose hostility toward Tolstoi's novel resulted in endless parodying. “A broad and varied comic sensibility had migrated from popular and folk culture to War and Peace and then back to popular culture in a reversal of Tolstoi's seriousness” (148). To Brooks’ conclusion that “In Tolstoy's hand, even levity becomes greatness,” (149) one can add that in the satirists’ hands, the serious and tragic episodes of Tolstoi's oeuvre became the subject of ridicule.

Describing Pierre's and Andrei's conversions, epiphanies and encounters with via mystica, Paperni concludes that “Tolstoy's position regarding mystical tradition might be better characterized as countermysticism. Adopting some of the general metaphysical postulates of mysticism, Tolstoi rejected the content of all the mystical stories of the inner life of the Godhead” (84). Once again, we see in Tolstoi this relentless desire to rewrite, rethink, and redo everything, from religion and mysticism to economics and education.

The longest and the most detailed essay of the collection is that of the editor (forty-six with sixteen pages of notes). It is a meticulously researched analysis of Tolstoi's thoughts that range from his interpretation of Judaism and its relation to Christianity, to his letters and comments on Jewish pogroms. Tolstoi shows remarkable consistency, refusing to focus on one issue that holds “‘an exclusive or preferential place’ over his other thoughts or feelings until the root of all injustice is defeated” (104).

Jeff Love and Stephen Halliwell grapple with the paradoxes of Tolstoi's dialectical art: he constructs, yet mocks narratives; he infects and seduces the audience with his art, yet tries to cure it from this seduction. Halliwell stresses that Tolstoi “was acutely, and sometimes almost pathologically aware of both the creative and receptive dynamics of such seduction, its status as a fundamental problem of aesthetics” (181). Tolstoi's immense creativity, coupled with his own awareness of the contradictions, tensions, and complex feedback of an artistic process, is what keeps Tolstoi's texts so alive and forever fascinating.

A person who attacks all major institutions of his time can't avoid education and pedagogy, the subject of Moulin-Stożek's investigation. As always, Tolstoi's criticism is trenchant and his recommendations are both sensible and original. Education, along with science, were for Tolstoi instruments of corruption and obfuscation, the means to detach us from answering the question of how to “live rightly” (161), that is, of finding our place and defining our task and vocation. For Tolstoi, “any education that fails to enhance or promote positive relations between the learner and their world was a bad education” (164). Furthermore, education is similar to art, whose effectiveness depends on the mutual interaction between the artist and the audience. Teachers learn from students, while students learn from teachers. Tolstoi, therefore, noticed that his Yasnaia Poliana school project was his “monastery and church” (162).

Exploring Tolstoi's life-long fixation on Shakespeare, Emerson focuses on how he and his newly enlisted ally, G.B. Shaw, reveal their own aesthetic and moral principles, their views on the institutions of reading, rhetoric, theater, performance, and audience manipulation. Tolstoi's intolerance of what he called “long, false, pompous monologues” (213) and the desire to liberate the audience from its reliance on Shakespeare's counterfeit art is clear. Pomposity, obfuscating rhetoric, schematic thinking and all sorts of verbal and intellectual abuse irritated Tolstoi before and after his conversion, and he never gave up fighting them.

In other words, despite the diversity of Tolstoi's interests, concerns, and methods, a rather consistent algorithm seemed to have governed this diversity. He was a hedgehog wearing a fox's clothes, so to speak. Yet one still can ask, “Why the Bard?” and what exactly drove Tolstoi into this quixotic and ridiculous enterprise if there was one? After all, is it not clear to anyone who's written a word, no matter in what language, as long as there is language, there would be Shakespeare, as there would be Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii? I suspect these attacks reveal something fundamental about Tolstoi. There is a method in this madness, and this method is worth investigating.

Russians of his day referred to Tolstoi as netovshik, a person bold, obnoxious, crazy, or wise enough to say “no” to anything that others hold in the highest esteem. Tolstoi had perfected this art of saying “nyet” long before Andrei Gromyko made the word famous. In her nuanced essay on Tolstoi's relevance for the twenty-first century, Chances reminds us of Tolstoi's penchant for Hans Christian Andersen's “The Emperor's New Clothes”; he included it in various collections on both sides of his crisis (1872 and 1907). The role of a child proclaiming the nudity of other people's idols must have been rather irresistible for Tolstoi.

But I would dare to offer one more reason for Tolstoi's need to de-crown Shakespeare. I suspect Tolstoi had an incredible resistance to the very concept of tragedy. Tolstoi's spasmodic need to dismiss every tragedy that makes the world go around is well captured by his own Levin, who mocks Stiva's predicament: “…those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy….And in platonic love there can be no tragedy, because in that love everything is clear and pure…” (Anna Karenina, 53). This view is obviously not Tolstoi's, and not even fully Levin's, but its articulation is symptomatic. While Tolstoi the artist explores tragic contradictions and tensions as powerfully as anyone, Tolstoi the rationalist and iconoclast denies the obvious, boldly proclaiming that the tragedy is a fake category and so is Shakespeare, the Emperor of tragic art. I believe Jeff Love highlights Tolstoi's predicament, when he points to “perfect indifference” of some of Tolstoi's characters: “nihilism for Tolstoy describes that perfect indifference to life or death, infinitely perfect, which seems to come into view most clearly with Karataev” (34). Can there be tragedy for someone who aspires to “perfect indifference”? Nor can there be tragedy for an ultimate rationalist—another aspiration of Tolstoi, as Medzhibovskaya reminded us quoting G.K. Chesterton on mysticism: “Tolstoy, with his immense genius…was deficient in one faculty alone. He is not a mystic…in the vain, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic” (11).

In conclusion, it is worth pondering the tension between artistic goals and means that tortured Tolstoi and puzzles everyone who writes about him. Commenting on Tolstoi's cosmic anarchism, Love writes, “to live without authority is a kind of freedom so radical it may be incapable of representation—and this is indeed, Tolstoy's gambit, a source of irony and adventure that amounts to the attempt to represent in form what withdraws from form” (28). Consequently, there is certain irony in the fact that the volume, which discusses Tolstoi's rejection of form, his nihilism, nominalism, and anarchism, relies on the authorities that discuss various aspects of Tolstoi's authorship and then another authority that reviews these authors. Tolstoi would surely find it humorous, but obviously not tragic.