New Books In Literary Studies

I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts education, which convinced me that there was really nothing I couldn’t master but gave me little or no indication of what I should do (beyond platitudes like “discover myself” and “do good”). So I thrashed about, armed with an ounce of knowledge and a ton of arrogance. I was insufferable. I won’t go into details, but let me just say my quest to discover who I was ended rather badly, albeit not in the long term. Life taught me what my liberal arts education couldn’t: that I was who I was and not much more. Having read Rosamund Bartlett‘s excellent Tolstoy: A Russia Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), I’m left wondering if Tolstoy ever came to this realization. Throughout his life, he searched for his true self. His launching pad was not a liberal arts education