The Main Russian Book. On War and Peace by L. N. Tolstoy

The new book by Vyacheslav Kuritsyn is an attempt to approach "War and Peace" as a literary attraction. The author describes the astonishing structure of Tolstoy's epic (the incredible number of viewpoints and angles, the paradoxical rhythmic pattern, the abundance... of internal rhymes, chronological disruptions, off-screen voices, "Nabokovian" patterns on the other side of the text) and gradually comes to the conclusion that all these effects are meaningful. In the last part of the book, assumptions are made about which features of Russian civilization and facts from Tolstoy's biography gave rise to this particular form of "War and Peace".