Mann’s View of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Times of War and Peace
Journal: Open Book Publishers
Year: 2024

This essay examines Thomas Mann’s views of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Mann’s acquaintance with Russian literature, which he read in German translation, began in his early youth, facilitated by the increasing translation of nineteenth-century Russian literature into German in the 1880s (by Wilhelm Wolfson, Friedrich Bodenstedt et al.). Russian literature always remained an important theme for Mann’s own philosophical writing: he wrote three essays on Tolstoy (1922, 1928, 1939), one on Dostoevsky (19