From Tolstoy to Trump
Today's populists in the US and Europe have manufactured a fictional world. But the virtual reality they have created has none of the bearing on real-world problems that attracts generation after generation of readers to great literature.
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LONDON – One of Leo Tolstoy’s preoccupations was the nature and limits of power. What was it that made France so formidable an enemy, particularly of Russia? This question was at the heart of his greatest novel, War and Peace – so much so that Tolstoy sometimes argued that his book was not a novel at all, but an inquiry into the philosophy of history.