Volume 16, Number 3 · February 25, 1971
Notes on Tolstoy
By Edmund Wilson
Tolstoy
by Henri Troyat
Fayard, 888 pp., $13.00
Tolstoy
by Henri Troyat, translated by Nancy Amphoux
Dell, 762 pp., $1.65 (paper)
Doubleday has published a translation of Henri Troyat's Tolstoy. This translation by Nancy Amphoux seems competent, but it is smoother in the French, which makes the conflicts and vicissitudes of the tumultuous Tolstoys run off at a very rapid pace—although the French version, as a piece of bookmaking, is of a clumsiness quite foreign to the French tradition. One would have expected a paperbound two volumes like Troyat's biography of Pushkin, but what we get is a hardbound monstrosity, six by almost nine inches and almost three inches thick, which is nearly impossible to handle without a reading rack.
Review, 7350 words
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