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Foster, John Burt Jr. Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World. New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury (Literary Studies), 2013. 248 pp. £17.99. ISBN 978–1–4411–5770–6, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 50, Issue 4, October 2014, Page 506, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqu050
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In John Burt Foster Jr.'s hands the concept of transnationality brings debates from comparative literature concerning canon and post-colonialism to Tolstoy's writings in a refreshing reminder of how central studies of Russian literature can be to the field of comparative literature. The first two parts of the monograph identify a transnational critique of Tolstoy's relation to western, especially French, literature and the limits of Soviet orthodoxy in rigidly codifying him as a realist writer. Part 3, entitled ‘Into the World’, stresses Tolstoy's anticipation of anti-colonial literature, as expressed most tellingly in his novel Hadji Murad, which explored Russian colonialism in the Caucasus. Chapter 9 reviews a polemic from the early 1990s when western critics misinterpreted Saul Bellow's statement regarding the lack of a ‘Zulu Tolstoy’ to mean that only the West could produce a writer of Tolstoy's stature when, as Foster clarifies, the opposite may be more to the point. Chapters 10 and 11 identify a western bias in the pattern of including Tolstoy's short story ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ in anthologies of world literature, which limits potentially rich transnational insights into Tolstoy to his familiar treatment of mortality in War and Peace and Anna Karenina and, moreover, ignores his influence on anti-colonialist authors such as Premchand and Mahfouz
