Book description
George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky has become a classic among
scholars of Russian literature. An essay in poetic and philosophic
criticism that bears mainly on the Russian masters, Tolstoy or
Dostoevsky deals also with larger themes: the epic tradition
extending from Homer to Tolstoy; the continuity of a "tragic
world view" from Oedipus Rex to King Lear and The Brothers
Karamazov; the contrasts between the epic and dramatic modes, between
irreconcilably opposed views of God and of history.
Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA
and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the
editorial staff of The Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a
member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wrote
Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and began The Death of Tragedy (1961). In
1964 he published Anno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the
aftermath of the Second World War. Language and Silence was published in
1967. His other work includes Proofs and Three Parables, which Faber
published in 1992. George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been
Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received
numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de
la Légion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des
Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld
Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.
