The Tolstoy Commons: A Companion Website to the Tolstoy Studies Journal
The Tolstoy Commons is an online community designed to foster conversations about the Russian author Lev Tolstoy and to serve as a clearinghouse for scholarly activity related to his life and works. We welcome announcements of new books, articles, reviews, and conferences, as well as discussions of new pedagogical approaches to teaching Tolstoy. The Tolstoy Commons is a companion website to the Tolstoy Studies Journal, the peer-reviewed organ of the Tolstoy Society of North America.
The Tolstoy Commons has two new initiatives:
1) The first, Tolstoy Interviews, is a series of interviews intended to publicize Tolstoy scholarship. If you have Tolstoy projects that you want us to feature, whether books (within the last 5 years) or more non-traditional, DH projects, or even a heavy-duty article, let us know and we will interview you too. We will be soliciting a few scholars on our own as well. Check out an interview with Donna Orwin on her recent book, Simply Tolstoy.
2) The second, Tolstoy Stories, is intended as a pedagogical resource, and was suggested by two intrepid Tolstoy scholars, Ilya Vinitsky and Tom Newlin.
For this one, we would like to invite scholars to tell us their favorite Tolstoy stories. We mean this in two ways. First, we are interested in true stories about Tolstoy that captivate you and you share in class with students. Second, your own Tolstoy stories, in the form of any particularly vivid personal reflections while reading and teaching Tolstoy. Some scholars have found teaching Tolstoy to be fundamentally different from teaching Dostoevsky and we welcome such pedagogical reflections.
We hope these stories will be both entertaining/enlightening but also potentially useful for other scholars in the classroom as we continue to keep making the case for why Tolstoy remains relevant to younger generations.