War and Peace, Love and Marriage, Globe and Mail

We are thrilled to announce that an excellent article about Sofia Tolstaya's My Life  appeared in Saturday's Globe and Mail. The article, called War and peace, love and marriage: How the University of Ottawa Press nabbed the rights to a memoir by Tolstoy's long-suffering wife was written by Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston,a local freelance writer.


Here's an excerpt: 

In the academic world, Leo (Lev Nikolaevich) Tolstoy is a colossus. He’s talked about, read, discussed, dissected and forms a pillar of studies of the novel itself. So how did the written memoirs of Tolstoy’s indomitable wife, Sofia Tolstaya (the Russian feminine version of Tolstoy), one of the most important and anticipated works in modern Tolstoy scholarship, land at a university press in Canada’s capital city? As with most things in academia, it involves an almost obsessive love of the subject, and lots of time. 

Twelve years ago, the University of Ottawa formed the Slavic Research Group under the direction of Andrew Donskov, a world-renowned Tolstoy expert. Since its inception, the group has produced nearly 40 volumes of high-calibre work. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that ours would be called the centre of Tolstoy studies in North America,” Donskov says.  [...] Over the years, Donskov worked in [Russia], published jointly with the Russian museums and organizations and eventually became the only foreign scholar on the editorial board of the Russian Academy of Sciences. When Tolstaya’s memoirs were scheduled to be printed in Russia as a coffee-table book, Donskov was entrusted with creating the full scholarly edition, as well as the obligation to treat the material as seriously as it deserved.

To read more, visit the Globe and Mail website at the following link:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/how-a-canadian-university-nabbed-the-rights-to-the-memoirs-of-tolstoys-wife/article1786973/page1/