Love and Hatred; The Troubled Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy

New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1994. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 400 pages. Includes Illustrations. Foreword and Prologue, as well as Epilogue, Acknowledgments, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Advance copy slip and publisher's press release laid in. Book One (The Years Before--1828-1879) covers The Trials of Early Marriage; A Narrow Escape from Matrimony; Two Very Different Kinds of Love; A Whirlwind Courtship; Marriage at Last--Despite the Doubts; Yasnaya Polyana, Sonya's Jealousies, and War and Peace; Anna Karenina; and Tolstoy's Great Midlife Crisis. Book Two (The Last Years, 1879-1910) covers The Troubled Saint; The Advent of Chertkov; The Kreutzer Sonata; Conflict and Good Works; Sonya's Strange Infatuation; No Rest, No Peace for the Writer at Seventy; War and Revolution, Illness and Death; and The Return of Chertkov. Book Three, The Last Year, 1910, covers The Beginning of the End, The Last Month, The Last Weeks, The Last Days, Flight!, and contains an Epilogue. In a touching, brilliant, and groundbreaking biography of one of literary history's most famous couples, at once a dual biography, a history, and the portrait of a long and stormy marriage, William Shirer's book explores the passionate, highly charged, and extraordinary lives of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy. This is the story of a great romance between two people who could live neither together nor apart. Their's was a romance that exhausted and obsessed them both, and that forms the basis for much of Tolstoy's work. William Lawrence Shirer (February 23, 1904 - December 28, 1993) was an American journalist and war correspondent. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany that has been read by many and cited in scholarly works for more than 50 years. Originally a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the International News Service, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what would become a CBS radio team of journalists known as "Murrow's Boys". He became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II (1940). With Murrow, he organized the first broadcast world news roundup, a format still followed by news broadcasts. Shirer wrote more than a dozen books besides The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, including Berlin Diary (published in 1941); The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), which drew on his experience living and working in France from 1925 to 1933; and a three-volume autobiography, 20th Century Journey (1976 to 1990). Derived from a Kirkus review: Given the Tolstoys' voluminous, unsparing, often shared, and ultimately rather deranged diaries, writing about this prizefight of a union is not much harder than simply showing up at ringside. Using the straight-line, calendar-like procedure of his famous Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer follows the count and countess through the rounds of their agonies. Shirer revisits Sonya's devotion as secretary; Leo's personal renunciation of one of the most fabulous gifts of talent in world art in favor of his own brand of obnoxious humility as a Christ figure; the ensuing acolytes; the jealous and largely ignored children; the comings and goings of fellow Russian writers and disciple-ish suck-ups; Sonya's pathetic attempt to snare the attentions of the composer Tanayev and thus win for herself a little well-deserved appreciation. All that's here is complete. A great man's marriage is of legitimate interest and his historical references to the foment of Russian society churning around the Tolstoys, to which they certainly contributed, are incorporated.