Volume LIV Number 1-2
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Books
Putting The Boot In
God and Man According to Tolstoy, by Alexander Boot; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 215 pages, £50.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
—Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
Genius and mediocrity frequently coincide in the same person. Alex Boot takes Leo (Lev) Tolstoy as a very striking case in point. Tolstoy was probably the greatest novelist of all time. Most of his readers in English have probably not gone beyond War and Peace and Anna Karenina, although his last major novel, Resurrection, sold more copies than the two acclaimed “great” novels put together. Perhaps surprisingly, most of Tolstoy’s writing, especially once he had passed fifty, was not only non-fiction but, according to Boot, spectacularly bad non-fiction, portentous work affecting to attend to humanity’s spiritual, moral and political needs and pronouncing loudly on everything.
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